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prose ^fancies 

IRtcbarb %c (BaUlenne 
mttb portrait 



1FleW]30rfe: G. p. Putnam's 

So7is,27 IV. Twenty-third St. 
%0\\^0X{\ Elkin Mathews 
and John Lane : i8gg 






Copyright, 1894 

By G. p. PUTNAM'S SONS 

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London 

By Richard Lb Galliennb 

Gift 
W. L. Shoemaker 

I $ ^'06 



TO 

MY DEAR WIFE 

MY PROSE FOR HER POETRY 

IN MEMORY 

OF TWO HAPPY YEARS 

OCTOBER 22, 1 89 1 

DECEMBER 6 

1893 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

A SPRING MORNING, I 

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE, .... lO 

LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS, . . . . 1 8 

FRACTIONAL HUMANITY, .... 28 

THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS, ... 35 

GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE, .... 46 

IRRELEVANT PEOPLE, 53 

THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE, ... 62 

POETS AND PUBLISHERS, .... ^l 

APOLLO'S MARKET, 88 

THE ' GENIUS ' SUPERSTITION, ... 96 

A BORROWED SOVEREIGN, . . . . I03 

ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY, . . . . Ill 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF * LIMITED EDITIONS,' . IIQ 

A PLEA FOR THE OLD PLAYGOER, . . • 1 26 



VI 



CONTENTS 



THE MEASURE OF A MAN, 
THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN, 
VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN, 
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER, . 
TRANSFERABLE LIVES, . 
THE APPARITION OF YOUTH, . 
THE PATHETIC FLOURISH, 
A TAVERN NIGHT, . 
SANDRA BELLONI'S PINEWOOD, 
WHITE SOUL, .... 



PAGE 

148 
156 
164 
170 
178 
184 
190 
198 



A SPRING MORNING 



Spring puts the old pipe to his h'ps and 
blows a note or two. At the sound, little 
thrills pass across the wintry meadows. 
The bushes are dotted with innumerable 
tiny sparks of green, that will soon set fire 
to the whole hedgerow ; here and there they 
have gone so far as those little tufts which 
the children call 'bread and cheese.' A 
gentle change is coming over the grim 
avenue of the elms yonder. They won't 
relent so far as to admit buds, but there 
is an unmistakable bloom upon them, like the 
promise of a smile. The rooks have known 
it for some weeks, and already their Jews' 
market is in full caw. The more com- 
plaisant chestnut dandles its sticky knobs. 
A 



2 PROSE FANCIES 

Soon they will be brussels-sprouts, and then 
they will shake open their fairy umbrellas. 
So says a child of my acquaintance. The 
water-lilies already poke their green scrolls 
above the surface of the pond, a few butter- 
cups venture into the meadows, but daisies 
are still precious as asparagus. The air 
is warm as your love's cheek, golden as 
canary. It is all a-clink and a-glitter, it 
trills and chirps on every hand. Some- 
where close by, but unseen, a young man is 
whistling at his work ; and, putting your ear 
to the ground, you shall hear how the earth 
beneath is alive with a million little beating 
hearts. Cest Vheure exquise. 

Presently along the road comes slowly, 
and at times erratically, a charming proces- 
sion. Following the fashion, or even setting 
it, three weeks since yon old sow budded. 
From her side, recalling the Trojan horse, 
sprang suddenly a little company of black- 
and-tan piglets, fully legged and snouted for 
the battle of life. She is taking them with 
her to put them to school at a farm two or 
three miles away. So I understand her. 
They surround her in a compact body, ever 



A SPRING MORNING 3 

moving and poking and squeaking, yet all 
keeping together. As they advance slowly, 
she towering above her tiny bodyguard, one 
thinks of Gulliver moving through Lilliput ; 
and there is a touch of solemnity in the 
procession which recalls a mighty Indian 
idol being carried through the streets, with 
people thronging about its feet. How deli- 
cately she steps, lest she hurt one of the little 
limbs ! And, meanwhile, mark the driver — 
for though the old pig pretends to ignore any 
such coercion, as men believe in free-will, 
yet there is a fate, a driver, to this idyllic 
domestic company. But how gentle is he 
too ! He never lets it be seen that he is 
driving them. He carries a little switch, 
rather, it would appear, for form's sake ; for 
he seldom does more with it than tickle the 
gravely striding posteriors of the quaint 
little people. He is wise as he is kind, 
for he knows that he is driving quicksilver. 
The least undue coercion, the least sudden 
start, and they will be off like spilled 
marbles, in eleven different directions. Some- 
times occasion arises for prompt action : 
when the poet of the family dreams he 



4 PROSE FANCIES 

discerns the promised land through the 
bottom of a gate, and is bent on squeezing 
his way under, and the demoralisation of 
the whole eleven seems imminent. Then, 
unconsciously applying the wisdom of Solo- 
mon, the driver deals a smart flick to the 
old mother. Seeing her move on, and 
reflecting that she carries all the provisions 
of the party, her children think better of 
their romance, and gambol after her, taking 
a gamesome pull at her teats from high 
spirits. 

The man never seems to get angry with 
them. He is smiling gently to himself all 
the time, as he softly and leisurely walks 
behind them. Indeed, wherever this moving 
nursery of young life passes, it awakens 
tenderness. The man who drove the gig 
so rapidly a little way off suddenly slows 
down, and, with a sympathetic word, walks 
his horse gingerly by. Every pedestrian 
stops and smiles, and on every face comes 
a transforming tenderness, a touch of almost 
motherly sweetness. So dear is young life 
to the eye and heart of man. 

A few weeks hence these same pedestrians 



A SPRING MORNING 5 

will pass these same pigs with no emotion, 
beyond, possibly, that produced by the 
sweet savour of frying ham. Their naivete^ 
their charming baby quaintness, will have 
departed for ever. Their features, as yet 
but roguishly indicated, will have become 
set and hidebound ; their soft little snouts 
will be ringed, and hard as a fifth hoof; 
their dainty little ears — veritable silk purses 
— will have grown long and bristly : in 
short, they will have lost that ineffable 
tender bloom of young life which makes 
them quite a touching sight to-day. Strange 
that loss of charm which comes with develop- 
ment in us all, pigs included. A tendency 
to pigginess, as in these youngsters, a ten- 
dency to manhood in the prattling and 
crowing babe, are both hailed as charming: 
but the full-grown pig ! the full-grown man ! 
Alas ! in each case the charm seems to flee 
with the advent of bristles. 

But let us return to the driver. 

Under his arm he carries a basket, from 
which now and again proceed suppressed 
squeaks and grunts. It is ' the rickling,' 
the weakling, of the family. It will pro- 



6 PROSE FANCIES 

bably find an early death, and be embalmed 
in sage and onions. The man has already 
had an offer for it — from * Mr. Lamb.' Mr. 
Lamb ! Yes, Mr. Lamb at Six-Elm Farm. 
* Oh ! I see.' But was it not a startling 
coincidence ? 

It has taken half an hour to come from 
the old bridge to the cross-roads, barely 
half a mile. And now, good-bye, funny 
little silken-coated piglets ; good-bye, grave 
old mother. Ge-whoop ! Good-bye, gentle 
driver. As you move behind your charge 
with that tender smile, with that burden 
safely pressed beneath your arm, I seem 
to have had a vision of the Good Shepherd. 

II 

Down by the river there is, as yet, little 
sign of spring. Its bed is all choked with 
last year's reeds, trampled about like a 
manger. Yet its running seems to have 
caught a happier note, and here and there 
along its banks flash silvery wands of palm. 
Right down among the shabby burnt-out 
underwood moves the sordid figure of a 



A SPRING MORNING 7 
man. He seems the very genius loci. His 
clothes are torn and soiled, as though he had 
slept on the ground. The white lining of 
one arm gleams out like the slashing in a 
doublet. His hat is battered, and he wears 
no collar. I don't like staring at his face, 
for he has been unfortunate. Yet a glimpse 
tells me that he is far down the hill of life, 
old and drink-corroded at fifty. He is 
miserably gathering sticks — perhaps a little 
job for the farm close by. He probably 
slept in the barn there last night, turned out 
drunk from the public-house. He will pro- 
bably do and be done by likewise to-night. 
How many faggots to the dram ? one 
wonders. What is he thinking as he rustles 
about disconsolately among the bushes? 
Of what is he dreaming} What does he 
make of the lark up there? But I notice 
he never looks at it. Perhaps he cannot 
bear to. For who knows what is in the 
heart beneath that poor soiled coat? If 
you have hopes, he may have memories. 
Some day your hopes will be memories 
too — birds that have flown away, flowers 
long since withered. 



8 PROSE FANCIES 

III 

A short way further along, I come across 
a boy gathering palm. He is a town boy, 
and has come all the way from Whitechapel 
thus early. He has already gathered a 
great bundle — worth five shillings to him, 
he says. This same palm will to-morrow 
be distributed over London, and those who 
buy sprigs of it by the Bank will know 
nothing of the blue-eyed boy who gathered 
it, and the murmuring river by which it 
grew. And the lad, once more lost in some 
squalid court, will be a sort of Sir John 
Mandevllle to his companions — a Sir John 
Mandeville of the fields, with their water-rats, 
their birds' eggs, and many other wonders. 
And one can imagine him saying, * And the 
sparrows there fly right up into the sun. and 
sing like angels ! ' But he won't get his 
comrades to believe thaU 

IV 

Spring has a wonderful way of bringing 
out hidden traits of character. Through my 
window I look out upon a tiny farm. It is 



A SPRING MORNING 9 
kept by a tall, hard-looking, rough-bearded 
fellow, whom I have watched striding about 
his fields all winter, with but little sympathy. 
Yet it would seem I have been doing him 
wrong. For this morning, as he passed 
along the outside of the railing wherein his 
two sheep were grazing, suddenly they came 
bounding towards him with every manifesta- 
tion of delight, literally recalling the lamb- 
kins which Wordsworth saw bound 'as to 
the tabor's sound.' They followed as far 
as the railing permitted, pushing their noses 
through at him ; nay, when at last he moved 
out of reach, they were evidently so much in 
love that they leaped the fence and made after 
him. And he, instead of turning brutally 
on them, as I had expected, smiled and 
played with them awhile. Indeed, he had 
some difficulty in disengaging himself from 
their persistent affection. So, evidently, 
they knew him better than I. 



A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE 

Why do we go on talking ? It is a serious 
question, one on which the happiness of 
thousands depends. For there is no more 
wearing social demand than that of com- 
pulsory conversation. All day long we 
must either talk, or — dread alternative — 
listen. Now, that were very well if we had 
something to say, or our fellow-sufferer 
something to tell, or, best of all, if either of 
us possessed the gift of clothing the old 
commonplaces with charm. But men with 
that great gift are not to be met with in every 
railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The 
man we actually meet is one whose joke, 
though we have signalled it a mile off, we 
are powerless to stop, whose opinions come 
out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, 
it always happens in life that the man — or 
woman — with whom we would like to talk is 



A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE ii 

at the next table. Those who really have 
something to say to each other so seldom 
have a chance of saying it 

Why, O why, do we go on talking o^ We 
ask the question in all seriousness, not 
merely in the hope of making some cheap 
paradoxical fun out of the answer. It is a 
cry from the deeps of ineffable boredom. 

Is it to impart information? At the best 
it is a dreary ideal. But, at any rate, it is a 
mistaken use of the tongue, for there is no 
information we can impart which has not 
been far more accurately stated in book- 
form. Even if it should happen to be a 
quite new fact, an accident happily rare as 
the transit of Venus — a new fact about the 
North Pole, for instance — well, a book, not 
a conversation, is the place for it. To talk 
book, past, present, or to come, is not to 
converse. 

To converse, as with every other art, is 
out of three platitudes to make not a fourth 
platitude — 'but a star.' Newness of infor- 
mation is no necessity of conversation : else 
were the Central News Agency the best of 
talkers. Indeed, the oldest information is 



12 PROSE FANCIES 

perhaps the best material for the artist as 
talker: though, truly, as with every other 
artist, material matters little. There are 
just two or three men of letters left to us, 
who provide us examples of that inspired 
soliloquy, those conversations of one, which 
are our nearest approach to the talk of other 
days. How good it is to listen to one of 
these ! — for it is the great charm of their talk 
that we remember nothing. There were no 
prickly bits of information to stick on one's 
mind like burrs, j. Their talk had no regular 
features, but, like a sunrise, was all music 
and glory. ^ 

The friend who talks the night through 
with his friend, till the dawn climbs in like a 
pallid rose at the window ; the lovers who, 
while the sun is setting, sit in the greenwood 
and say, ' Is it thou ? It is I !' in awestruck 
antiphony, till the stars appear ; and, holiest 
converse of all, the mystic prattle of mother 
and babe : why are all these such wonder- 
ful talk if not because we remember no 
word of them — only the glory? They 
leave us nothing, in image worthy of the 
time, to * pigeon-hole,* nothing to store 



A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE 13 

with our vouchers in the 'pigeon-holes' of 
memory. 

Pigeon-holes of memory ! Think of the 
degradation. And memory was once a 
honeycomb, a hive of all the wonderful 
words of poets, of all the marvellous moods 
of lovers. Once it was a shell that listened 
tremulously upon Olympus, and caught the 
accents of the Gods; now it is a phono- 
graph catching every word that falleth from 
the mouths of the board of guardians. Once 
a muse, now a servile drudge 'twixt man 
and man. 

And this * pigeon-hole ' memory — once an 
impressionist of divine moments, now the 
miser of all unimportant, trivial detail — is 
our tyrant, the muse of modern talk. Men 
talk now not what they feel or think, but 
what they remember, with their bad good 
memories. If they remembered the poets, 
or their first love, or the spring, or the stars, 
it were well enough : but no ! they remember 
but what the poets ate and wore, the last 
divorce case, the state of the crops, the last 
trivial detail about Mars. The man with the 
muck-rake would have made a great repu- 



14 PROSE FANCIES 

tation as a talker had he lived to-day : for, 
as our modern speech has it, a Great Man 
simply means a Great Memory, and a Great 
Memory is simply a prosperous marine-store. 

What, in fact, do we talk about ? Mainly 
about our business, our food, or our diseases. 
All three themes more or less centre in that 
of food. How we revel in the brutal 
digestive details, and call it gastronomy! 
How our host plumes himself on his wine, 
as though it were a personal virtue, and not 
the merely obvious accessory of a man with 
ten thousand a year ! Strange, is it not, how 
we pat and stroke our possessions as though 
they belonged to us, instead of to our money 
— our grandfather's money ? 

There is, some hope and believe, an 
imminent Return to Simplicity — Socialism 
the unwise it call. If it be really true, what 
good news for the grave humorous man, who 
hates talking to anything but trees and 
children ! For, if that Return to Simplicity 
means anything, it must mean the sweeping 
away of immemorial rookeries of talk — such 
crannied hives of gossip as the professions, 
with all their garrulous heritage of trivial 



A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE 15 

witty afia : literary, dramatic, legal, aristo- 
cratic, ecclesiastical, commercial. How good 
to dip them all deep in the great ocean of 
oblivion, and watch the bookworms, diarists, 
* raconteurs,' and all the old-clothesmen of life, 
scurrying out of their holes, as when in 
summer-time Mary Anne submerges the cock- 
roach trap within the pail ! And O, let there 
be no Noah to that flood ! Let none survive 
to tell another tale ; for, only when the 
chronicler of small-beer is dead, shall we be 
able to know men as men, heroes as heroes, 
poets as poets — instead of mere centres of 
gossip, an inch of text to a yard of footnote. 
Then only may we begin to talk of some- 
thing worth the talking : not merely of how 
the great man creased his trousers, and call it 
'the study of character,' but of how he was 
great, and whether it is possible to climb 
after him. 

Talk, too, is so definite, so limited. The 
people we meet might seem so wonderful, 
might mean such quaint and charming 
meanings sometimes, if they would not 
talk. Like some delightfully bound old 
volume in a foreign tongue, that looks like 



i6 PROSE FANCIES 

one of the Sibylline books, till a friend 
translates the title and explains that it is 
a sixteenth-century law dictionary: so are 
the men and women we meet. How inter- 
esting they might be if they would not 
persist in telling us what they are about ! 

That, indeed, is the abiding charm of 
Nature. No sensible man can envy Asylas, 
to whom the language of birds was as 
familiar as French argot to our young 
decadents. Think how terrible it would be 
if Nature could all of a sudden learn 
English ! That exquisite mirror of all our 
shifting moods would be broken for ever. 
No longer might we coin the woodland 
into metaphors of our own joys and sorrows. 
The birds would no longer flute to us of 
lost loves, but of found worms ; we should 
realise how terribly selfish they are ; we 
could never more quote * Hark, hark, the 
lark at heaven's gate sings,' or poetise with 
Mr. Patmore of * the heavenly-minded thrush.' 
And what awful voices some of those great 
red roses would have ! Yes, Nature is so 
sympathetic because she is so silent ; because, 
when she does talk, she talks in a language 



A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE 17 

which we cannot understand, but only guess 
at ; and her silence allows us to hear her 
eternal meanings, which her gossiping would 
drown. 

Happy monks of La Trappe! One has 
heard the foolish chattering world take pity 
upon you. An hour of talk to a year of 
silence ! O heavenly proportion ! And I 
can well imagine that when that hour has 
come, it seems but a trivial toy you have 
forgotten how to play with. Were I a 
Trappist, I would use my hour to evangelise 
converts to silence, would break the long 
year's quiet but to whisper, ^ How good is 
silence ! ' Let us inaugurate a secular La 
Trappe, let us plot a conspiracy of silence, 
let us send the world to Coventry. Or, if 
we must talk, let it be in Latin, or in the 
* VolapUk ' of myriad-meaning music ; and 
let no man joke save in Greek — that all 
may laugh. But, best of all, let us leave 
off talking altogether, and listen to the 
morning stars. 



LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS 

As I waited for an omnibus at the corner of 
Fleet Street the other day, I was the spec- 
tator of a curious occurrence. Suddenly 
there was a scuffle hard by me, and, turning 
round, I saw a powerful gentlemanly man 
wrestling with two others in livery, who were 
evidently intent on arresting him. These 
men, I at once perceived, belonged to the 
detective force of the Incorporated Society of 
Authors, and were engaged in the capture of 
a notorious plagiarist. I knew the prisoner 
well. He had, in fact, pillaged from my own 
writings ; but I was none the less sorry for 
his plight, to which, I would assure the 
reader, I was no party. Yet he was, I 
admit, an egregiously bad case, and my pity 
is doubtless misplaced sentiment. Like 
many another, he had begun his career as a 
quotation and ended as a plagiarism, daring 

18 



LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS 19 
even, in one instance, to imitate that shadow 
in the fairy-tale, which rose up on a sudden 
one day and declared himself to be the 
substance and the substance his shadow. 
Indeed, he had so far succeeded as to make 
many people question whether or not he 
was the original and the other man the 
plagiarism. However, there was no longer 
to be any doubt of it, for his captors had 
him fast this time ; and, presently, we saw 
him taken off in a hansom, well secured 
between strong inverted commas. 

This curious circumstance set me reflecting, 
and, as we trundled along towards Charing 
Cross, my mind gave birth to sundry senten- 
tious reflections. 

After all, I thought, that unlucky plagiarist 
is no worse than most of us : for is it not 
true that few of us live as conscientiously as 
we should within our inverted commas? 
We are far more inclined to live in that 
author, not ourselves, who makes for origin- 
ality. It is, of course, difficult, even with 
the best intentions, to make proper acknow- 
ledgment of all our 'authorities'— to attach, 
so to say, the true 'del et sculp: to all our 



20 PROSE FANCIES 

little bits of art. There is so much in our 
lives that we honestly don't know how we 
came by. 

As I reflected in this wise, I was drawn to 
notice my companions in the omnibus, and 
lo ! there was not an original person amongst 
us. Yet I looked in vain to see if they wore 
their inverted commas. Not one of them, 
believe me, had had the honesty to bring 
them. Each looked at me unblushingly, as 
though he were really original, and not a 
cheap German print of originals I had seen 
in books and pictures since I could read. 
I really think that they must have been 
unaware of their imposture. They could 
hardly have pretended so successfully. 

There was the young dandy just let loose 
from his band-box, wearing exactly the same 
face, the same smile, the same neck-tie, 
holding his stick in exactly the same fashion, 
talking exactly the same words, with pre- 
cisely the same accent, as his neighbour, 
another dandy, and as all the other dandies 
between the Bank and Hyde Park Corner. 
Yet he seemed persuaded of his own origin- 
ality. He evidently felt that there was 



LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS 21 

something individual about him, and 
apparently relied with confidence on his 
friend not addressing a third dandy by 
mistake for him. I hope he had his name 
safe in his hat. 

Looking at these three examples of 
Nature's love of repeating herself, I said to 
myself: Somewhere in heaven stands a 
great stencil, and at each sweep of the 
cosmic brush a million dandies are born^ 
each one alike as a box of collars. Indeed, 
I felt that this stencil process had been 
employed in the manufacture of every single 
person in that omnibus : two middle-aged 
matrons, each of whom seemed to think that 
having given birth to six children was an 
indisputable claim to originality ; two elderly 
business men to correspond ; a young miss 
carrying music and wearing eye-glasses ; and 
a clergyman discussing stocks with one of 
the business men ; I alone in my corner 
being, of course, the one occupant for whom 
Nature had been at the expense of casting a 
special mould, and at the extravagance of 
breaking it. 

Presently a matron and a business man 



22 PROSE FANCIES 

alighted, and two dainty young women, 
evidently of artistic tendencies, joined the 
Hammersmith pilgrims. One saw at a glance 
that they were very sure of their originality. 
There were no inverted commas around their 
pretty young heads, bless them ! But then 
Queen Anne houses are as much on a pattern 
as more commonplace structures, and Bedford 
Parkians are already being manufactured by 
celestial stencil. What I specially noticed 
about them was their plagiarised voices — 
curious, yearning things, evidently intended 
to suggest depths of infinite passion, con- 
trolled by many a wild and weary past, 

* Infinite passion and the pain 
Of finite souls that yearn ' — 

the kind of voice, you know, in which 
Socialist actresses yearn out passages from 
'The Cenci,' feeling that they do a fearful 
thing. The voice began, I believe, with 
Miss Ellen Terry. With her, though, it is 
charming, for it is, we feel, the voice of real 
emotion. There are real tears in it. It is 
her own. But with these ladies, who were 
discussing the last * Independent ' play, it 



LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS 23 

was so evidently a stop pulled out by 
affectation — the vox inhtimana, one might 
say, for it is a voice unlike anything else to 
be found in the four elements. It has its 
counterpart in the imitators of Mr. Beerbohm 
Tree — young actors who likewise endeavour 
to make up for the lack of anything like 
dramatic passion by pretending to control 
it : the control being feigned by a set jaw or 
a hard, throaty, uncadenced voice of preter- 
natural solemnity. These ladies, too, wore 
plagiarised gowns of the most 'original' 
style, plagiarised hats, glittering plagiarised 
smiles ; and yet they so evidently looked 
down on every one else in the omnibus, whom, 
perhaps, after all, it had been kinder of me 
to describe as the hackneyed quotations of 
humanity, who had probably thought it 
unnecessary to wear their inverted commas, 
as they were so well known. 

At last I grew impatient of them, and, 
leaving the omnibus, finished my journey 
home by the Underground. What was my 
surprise when I reached it to find our little 
house wearing inverted commas — two on the 
chimney, and two on the gate ! My wife. 



24 PROSE FANCIES 

too ! and the words of endearing salutation 
with which I greeted her, why, they also to 
my diseased fancy seemed to leave my lips 
between quotation marks. There is nothing 
in which we fancy ourselves so original as in 
our terms of endearment, nothing in which 
we are so like all the world ; for, alas ! there 
is no euphuism of affection which lovers have 
not prattled together in springtides long 
before the Christian era. If you call your 
wife * a chuck,' so did Othello ; and, whatever 
dainty diminutive you may hit on, Catullus, 
with his warbling Latin, 'makes mouths at 
our speech.' 

I grew so haunted with this oppressive 
thought, that my wife could not but notice 
my trouble. But how could I tell her of the 
spectral inverted commas that dodged every 
move of her dear head? — tell her that our 
own original firstborn, just beginning to talk 
as never baby talked, was an unblushing 
plagiarism of his great-great-great-grand- 
father, that our love was nothing but the 
expansion of a line of Keats, and that our 
whole life was one hideous mockery of 
originality? * Woman,' I felt inclined to 



LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS 25 

ihriek, * be yourself, and not your great- 
grandmother. A man may not marry his 
great-grandmother. For God's sake let us 
all be ourselves, and not ghastly mimicries 
of our ancestors, or our neighbours. Let us 
shake ourselves free from this evil dream of 
imitation. Merciful Heaven, it is killing 
me ! ' But surely that was a quotation too, 
and, accidentally catching sight of the back 
of my hand, suddenly the tears sprang to 
my eyes, for it was just so the big soft veins 
used to be on the hands of my father, when 
a little boy I prayed between his knees. 
He was gone, but here was his hand — his 
hand, not mine ! 

Then an idea possessed me. There was 
but one way. I could die. There was a 
little phial of laudanum in the medicine- 
cupboard that always leered at me from 
among the other bottles like a serpent's eye. 
Thrice happy thought ! Who would miss 
such a poor imitation ? Even the mere 
soap-vending tradesmen bid us ' beware of 
imitations.' Dark wine of forgetfulness. . . . 
No, that was a quotation. However, here 
was the phial. I drew the cork, inhaled for 



26 PROSE FANCIES 

a moment the hard dry odour of poppies, 
and prepared to drink. But just at that 
moment I seemed to hear a horrid little 
laugh coming out of the bottle, and a voice 
chuckled at my ear : ' You ass, do you call 
that original ' ? It was so absurd that I 
burst out into hysterical laughter. Here 
had I been about to do the most * banal ' 
thing of all. Was there anything in the 
world quite so commonplace as suicide ? 

And with the good spirits of laughter 
came peace. Nay, why worry to be 'original'? 
Why such haste to be unlike the rest of the 
world, when the best things of life were 
manifestly those which all men had in 
common } Was love less sweet because my 
next-door neighbour knew it as well ? Would 
the same reason make death less bitter? 
And were not those tender diminutives all 
the more precious, because their vowels had 
been rounded for us by the sweet lips of 
lovers dead and gone? — sainted jewels, still 
warm from the beat of tragic bosoms, flowers 
which their kisses had freighted with im- 
mortal meanings. 

And then I bethought me how the 



LIFE IN INVERTED COMMAS 27 

meadow-daisies were one as the other, and 
how, when the pearly shells of the dog rose 
settled on the hedge like a flight of butter- 
flies, one was as the other ; how the birds 
sang alike, how star was twin with star, and 
in peas is no distinction. My rhetoric 
stopped as I was about to say ' as wife is to 
wife' — for I thought I would first kiss her 
and see : and lo ! I was once more perplexed, 
for as I looked down into her eyes, simple 
and blue and deep, as the sky is simple and 
blue and deep, I declared her to be the only 
woman in the world — which Avas obviously 
not exact. But it was true, for all that 



FRACTIONAL HUMANITY 

Mankind, in its heavy fashion, has chosen to 
mock the tailor with the fact — the indubit- 
able fact — that he is but the ninth part of a 
man. Yet, after all, at this time of day, it 
seems more of a compliment than a gibe. 
To be a whole ninth of a man ! Few of us, 
when we ponder it, can boast so much. 
Take, for instance, that other proverbial case 
of the fractional-part-of-a-pin-maker. It takes 
nine persons to make a pin, we were taught 
in our catechism. Actually that means that 
it takes nine persons to make one whole pin- 
maker, which leaves the question still to be 
solved as to how many whole pin-makers it 
takes to make a man. What is the relation 
of one pin-maker to the whole social 
economy ? That discovered, a multiplication 
by nine will give us the exact fractional part 
of manhood which belongs to the ninth-of-a- 



FRACTIONAL HUMANITY 29 

pin-maker. Obviously he is a much more 
microscopic creature than the immemorially 
despised tailor, and, alas ! his case is nearest 
that of most of us. And it is curious to 
notice how we rejoice in, rather than lament, 
this inevitable result of that great law of 
differentiation, which one may figure as a 
terrible machine hour after hour chopping 
up mankind into more and more infini- 
tesimal fragments. We feel a pride in being 
spoken of as ' specialists ' — and yet what 
is a specialist ? The nine-hundred-and- 
ninety-ninth part of a man. Call me not 
an entomologist, call me a lepidopterist, if 
you will — though, really, that is too broad 
a term for a man who is not so much taken 
up with moths generally as with the third 
ring of the antennae of the great oak-eggar. 

If one is troubled with a gift for symbol- 
ism, it is hard to treat any man one meets as 
though he were really a whole man : to treat 
a lawyer as though he were anything but a 
deed of assignment, or a surgeon as if he 
were anything more than an operation. As 
the metropolitan trains load and unload in a 
morning, what does one see? Gross upon 



30 PROSE FANCIES 

gross of steel pens, a few quills, whole 
carriages full of bricklayers' trowels, and how 
strange it seems to watch all the bank-books 
sorting themselves out from the motley, and 
arranging themselves in the first classes, just 
as we see them on the shelf in the bank. It 
is a curious sight. The little shop-girl there, 
what is she but a roll of pink ribbon ? — nay, 
she is but half-a-yard. And the poor infini- 
tesimal porters and guards, how pathetically 
small seems their share in the great mono- 
syllable Man, animalcules in that great 
social system which, again, is but an animal- 
cule in the blood of Time. Still more infini- 
tesimal seems the man who is a subdivision, 
not of a form of work even, but merely of a 
form of taste ; the man who collects foreign 
stamps, say, or book-plates, or arrow-heads, 
the connoisseur of a tiny section of one of the 
lesser schools of Italian painting, the coral- 
insect who has devoted his life to a participle, 
first-edition men, and all those various book- 
worms who, without impropriety be it 
spoken, are the maggots that breed in the 
dung of the great. A certain friend of mine 
always appears to me in the similitude of a 



FRACTIONAL HUMANITY 31 

first edition of one of Mr. Hardy's novels. 
I have the greatest difficulty at times to 
prevent myself forcibly setting him upon my 
shelf to complete my set ; for, oddly enough, 
he is the one bit of Hardyana I lack. In 
which confession I let the reader into the 
secret of my own petty limitations. To have 
one's horizon bounded by a book-plate, to 
have no hope, no wish in life, beyond a first 
edition ! The workers, however sectional, 
have some place in the text of the great 
book of life, but such mere testers and tasters 
of existence have hardly a place even in the 
gloss, though it be printed in the most 
microscopic diamond. 

And every moment, as we said, we are 
being turned out smaller and smaller from 
the mill of Time. You ask your little boy 
what he would like to be when he grows 
up. To your consternation he answers, ' A 
man !' You hide your face : you cannot tell 
him how impossible it is now to be that. 
Poor little chap ! He is born centuries too 
late. You cannot promise even that he 
shall be a tailor, for by the time he is old 
enough to be apprenticed, how do you know 



32 PROSE FANCIES 

how that ancient profession may be divided 
up ? May you not have sadly to tell him : 
* My poor boy, it is impossible to make you 
that — for there are no longer any whole- 
tailors. You may, if you like, be a thread- 
waxer or a needle-threader ; you may be one 
of the thirty men it takes to make a button- 
hole, but a complete tailor — alas ! it is 
impossible.' 

Who will save us from this remorseless 
law of eternal subdivision? To make one 
complete man out of all this vast collection of 
snips and snippets of humanity. To piece 
all the trades, professions, and fads together, 
like a puzzle, till one saw the honest face of 
a genuine man round and whole once more. 
To take these dry bones of the Valley of 
Commerce, and powerfully breathe into 
them the unifying breath of life, that once 
more they stand up, not as fractional bones 
of the wrist or the ankle of manhood, but 
mighty, full-blooded men as of old. Ah ! 
we must wait for a new creation for that. 

The mystics have a suggestive fancy that 
all our vast complex life once existed as a 
peaceful unit in the mind of God. But 



FRACTIONAL HUMANITY 33 

as God, brooding in the abyss, meditated 
upon Himself, various thoughts separated 
themselves and revolved within the atmo- 
sphere of His mind, at first unconscious 
of themselves or each other. Presently, 
desire of separate existence awoke in these 
shadowy things, a lust of corporeality grew 
upon them, and hence at last the fall into 
physical life, the realisation in concrete form 
of their diaphanous Individualities. And 
that original cause of man's separation from 
deity, this desire of subdivision, how it has 
gone on operating, more and more ! We 
call it differentiation, but the mystic would 
describe it as dividing ourselves more and 
more from God, the primeval unity in which 
alone is blessedness. Blake in one of his 
prophetic books sings man's * fall into 
Division and his resurrection into Unity.' 
And when we look about us and consider 
but the common use of words, how do we 
find the mystic's apparently wild fancy illus- 
trated in every section of our commonplace 
lives. What do we mean when we speak of 
* division' of interests, 'division' of families, 
when we say that * union ' is strength, or 



34 PROSE FANCIES 

how good it is to dwell together in * unity,* 
or speak of lives * made one ' ? Are we 
not unwittingly expressing the unconscious 
yearning of the fractions to merge once more 
in the sweet kinship of the unit, of the ninths 
and the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninths Oi 
humanity to merge their differences in the 
mighty generalisation Man, of man to merge 
his finite existence in the mysterious infinite, 
the undivided, indivisible One, to *be made 
one,' as theology phrases it, ' with God ' ? 
How the complex life of our time longs to 
return to its first happy state of simplicity, 
we feel on every hand. What is Socialism 
but a vast throb of man's desire after unity ? 
We are overbred. The simple old type of 
manhood is lost long since in endless orchid- 
aceous variation. O ! to be simple shepherds, 
simple sailors, simple delvers of the soil, to 
be something complete on our own account, 
to be relative to nothing save God and His 
stars ! 



THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS 

O ma pauvre Muse ! est-ce toi ? 

Fame in Athens and Florence took the form 
of laurel, in London it is represented by 
'Romeikes.' Hyacinth Rondel, the very 
latest new poet, sat one evening not long 
ago in his elegant new chambers, with a 
cloud of those pleasant witnesses about him, 
as charmed by 'the rustle' of their * loved 
Apollian leaves ' as though they had been 
veritable laurel or veritable bank-notes. His 
rooms were provided with all those distin- 
guished comforts and elegancies proper to a 
success that may any moment be inter- 
viewed. Needless to say, the walls had 
been decorated by Mr, Whistler, and there 
was not a piece of furniture in the room 
that had not belonged to this or that poet 
deceased. Priceless autograph portraits of 
all the leading: actors and actresses littered 



36 PROSE FANCIES 

the mantelshelf with a reckless prodigality, 
the two or three choice etchings were, of 
course, no less conspicuously inscribed to 
their illustrious confrere by the artists — 
naturally, the very latest hatched in Paris. 
There was hardly a volume in the elegant 
Chippendale bookcases not similarly in- 
scribed. Mr. Rondel would as soon have 
thought of buying a book as of paying for a 
stall. To the eye of imagination, therefore, 
there was not an article in the room which 
did not carry a little trumpet to the distin- 
guished poet's honour and glory. Hidden 
from view in his buhl cabinet, but none the 
less vivid to his sensitive egoism, were those 
tenderer trophies of his power, spoils of the 
chase, which the adoring feminine had 
offered up at his shrine : all his love-letters 
sorted in periods, neatly ribboned and 
snugly ensconced in various sandalwood 
niches — much as urns are ranged at the 
Crematorium, Woking — with locks of hair of 
many hues. He loved most to think of 
those letters in which the women had gladly 
sought a spiritual suttee, and begged him to 
cement the stones of his temple of fame with 



THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS 37 

the blood of their devoted hearts. To have 
had a share in building so distinguished a 
life — that was enough for them ! They 
asked no such inconvenient reward as 
marriage : indeed, one or two of them had 
already obtained that boon from others. To 
serve their purpose, and then, if it must be, 
to be forgotten, or — wild hope — to be em- 
balmed in a sonnet sequence : that was 
reward enough. 

In the midst of this silent and yet so 
eloquent orchestra, which from morn to 
night was continually crying ' Glory, glory, 
glory ' in the ear of the self-enamoured poet, 
Hyacinth Rondel was sitting one evening. 
The last post had brought him the above- 
mentioned leaves of the Romeike laurel, and 
he sat in his easiest chair by the bright fire, 
adjusting them, metaphorically, upon his 
high brow, a decanter at his right-hand and 
cigarette smoke curling up from his left. At 
last he had drained all the honey from the 
last paragraph, and, with rustling shining 
head, he turned a sweeping triumphant gaze 
around his room. But, to his surprise, he 
found himself no longer alone. Was it the 



38 PROSE FANCIES 

Muse in dainty modern costume and deli- 
cately tinted cheek ? Yes ! it was one of 
those discarded Muses who sometimes 
remain upon the poet's hands as Fates. 

When she raised her veil she certainly 
looked more of a Fate than a Muse. Hei 
expression was not agreeable. The poet, 
afterwards describing the incident and re- 
membering his Dante, spoke of her in an 
allegorical sonnet as * lady of terrible aspect, 
and symbolized her as Nemesis. 

He now addressed her as * Annette,' and 
in his voice were four notes of exclamation. 
She came closer to him, and very quietly, but 
with an accent that was the very quintes- 
sence of Ibsenism, made the somewhat 
mercantile statement : * I have come for my 
half-profits ! ' 

* Half-profits ! What do you mean ? Are 
you mad ? ' 

* Not in the least ! I want my share in 
the profits of all this pretty poetry,' and she 
contemptuously ran her fingers over the 
several slim volumes on the poet's shelves 
which represented his own contribution to 
English literature. 



THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS 39 

Rondel began to comprehend, but he was 
as yet too surprised to answer. 

* Don't you understand ? ' she went on. 
* It takes two to make poetry like yours — 

" They steal their song the lips that sing 
From lips that only kiss and cling." 

Do you remember? Have I quoted cor- 
rectly ? Yes, here it is ! ' taking down a 
volume entitled Liber Amoris^ the passionate 
confession which had first brought the poet 
his fame. As a matter of fact, several ladies 
had * stood ' for this series, but the poet had 
artfully generalised them into one supreme 
Madonna, whom Annette believed to be her- 
self Indeed, she had furnished the warmest 
and the most tragic colouring. Rondel, how- 
ever, had for some time kept his address a 
secret from Annette. But the candle set upon 
a hill cannot be hid : fame has its disadvan- 
tages. To a man with creditors or any other 
form of * a past,' it is no little dangerous to 
have his portrait in the Review of Reviews, 
A well-known publisher is an ever-present 
danger. By some such means Annette had 
found her poet. The papers could not be 
decorated with reviews of his verse, and she 



40 PROSE FANCIES 

not come across some of them. Indeed, she 
had, with burning cheek and stormy bosom, 
recognised herself in many an intimate con- 
fession. It was her hair, her face, all her 
beauty, he sang, though the poems were 
dedicated to another. 

She turned to another passage as she 
stood there — ' How pretty it sounds in 
poetry ! ' she said, and began to read : — 

' "There in the odorous meadowsweet afternoon, 

With the lark like the dream of a song in the dreamy 
blue. 
All the air abeat with the wing and buzz of June, 

We met — she and I, I and she," [You and I, I and 
you.] 
** And there, while the wild rose and woodbine deliciousness 
blended, 
We kissed and we kissed and we kissed, till the afternoon 
ended. . . .'" 

Here Rondel at last interrupted — 
'Woman!' he said, 'are your cheeks so 
painted that you have lost all sense of 
shame?' But she had her answer — 

* Man ! are you so great that you have 
lost the sense of pity? And which is the 
greater shame : to publish your sins in large 
paper and take royalties for them, or to speak 
of them, just you and I together, you and 



THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS 41 

I, as "there in the odorous meadowsweet 
afternoon " ? ' 

* Look you/ she continued, ' an artist pays 
his model at least a shilling an hour, and it 
is only her body he paints : but you use 
body and soul, and offer her nothing. Your 
blues and reds are the colours you have 
stolen from her eyes and her heart — stolen, 
I say, for the painter pays so much a tube 
for his colours, so much an hour for his 
model, but you ' 

' I give you immortality. Poor fly, I give 
you amber,' modestly suggested the poet. 

But Annette repeated the word * Immor- 
tality ! ' with a scorn that almost shook the 
poet's conceit, and thereupon produced an 
account, which ran as follows : — 

' Mr. Hyacinth Rondel 

Dr. to Miss Annette Jones, 
For moiety of the following royalties : — 



Moonshine and Meadowsweet, . 


500 copies. 


Coral and Bells, . . . . 


750 » 


Liber Amoris, 3 editions, . 


3,000 „ 


Forbidden Fruit, 5 editions, 


5,000 „ 



9,250 copies at is. 

= ;£462, I OS. 

Moiety of same due to Miss Jones, ;^23l 5s.' 



42 PROSE FANCIES 

* I don't mind receipting it for two hun- 
dred and thirty,' she said, as she handed it to 
him. 

Hyacinth was completely awakened by 
this : the joke was growing serious. So he 
at once roused up the bully in him, and 
ordered her out of his rooms. But she 
smiled at his threats, and still held out her 
account. At last he tried coaxing : he even 
had the insolence to beg her, by the memory 
of the past they had shared together, to spare 
him. He assured her that she had vastly 
overrated his profits, that fame meant far 
more cry than wool : that, in short, he was up 
to the neck in difiBculties as it was, and really 
had nothing like that sum in his possession. 

* Very well, then,' she replied at last, * you 
must marry me instead. Either the money 
or the marriage. Personally, I prefer the 
money ' — Rondel's egoism twinged like a 
hollow tooth — ' and if you think you can 
escape me and do neither, look at this ! ' and 
she drew a revolver from her pocket. 

' They are all loaded,' she added. ' Now, 
which is it to be ? ' 

Rondel made a movement as if to snatch 



THE WOMAN S HALF-PROFiib 43 

the weapon from her, but she sprang back 
and pointed it at his head. 

* If you move, I fire.' 

Now one would not need to be a minor 
poet to be a coward under such circum- 
stances. Rondel could see that Annette 
meant what she said. She was clearly a 
desperate woman, with no great passion for 
life. To shoot him and then herself would 
be a little thing in the present state of her 
feelings. Like most poets, he was a prudent 
man — he hesitated, leaning with closed fist 
upon the table. She stood firm. 

* Come,' she said at length, ' which is it to 
be — the revolver, marriage, or the money ? ' 
She ominously clicked the trigger, ' I give 
you five minutes.' 

It was five minutes to eleven. The clock 
ticked on while the two still stood in their 
absurdly tragic attitudes — he still hesitating, 
she with her pistol in line with the brain 
that laid the golden verse. The clock 
whirred before striking the hour. Annette 
made a determined movement. Hyacinth 
looked up, he saw she meant it, all the more 
for the mocking indifference of her expression. 



44 PROSE FANCIES 

*Once more — death, marriage, or the 

money ? ' 

The clock struck. 

* The money/ gasped the poet 

« « « « « 

But Annette still kept her weapon in line. 

* Your cheque-book ! ' she said. Rondel 
obeyed. 

*Pay Miss Annette Jones, or order, the 
sum of two hundred and thirty pounds. No, 
don't cross it ! * 

Rondel obeyed. 

* Now, toss it over to me. You observe I 
still hold the pistol.' 

Rondel once more obeyed. Then, still 
keeping him under cover of the ugly-looking 
tube, she backed towards the door. 

* Good-bye,' she said. * Be sure I shall 
look out for your next volume.' 

Rondel, bewildered as one who had lived 
through a fairy-tale, sank into his chair. 
Did such ridiculous things happen? He 
turned to his cheque-book. Yes, there was 
the counterfoil, fresh as a new wound, from 
which indeed his bank account was profusely 
bleeding. 



THE WOMAN'S HALF-PROFITS 45 
Then he turned to his laurels : but, be- 
hold, they were all withered. 

So, after a while, he donned hat and coat, 
and went forth to seek a flatterer as a pick- 
me-up. 



GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE 

The reader will remember how Lamb 
imagines him as a rubicund priest of Hymen, 
and pictures him * attended with thousands 
and ten thousands of little loves, and the 
air is 

" Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings." 

Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy 
precentors ; and instead of the crozier, the 
mystical arrow is borne before thee.' Alas, 
who indeed would have expected the bitter 
historical truth, and have dreamed that poor 
Valentine, instead of being that rosy vision, 
was one of the Church's most unhappy 
martyrs ? Tradition has but two pieces of 
information about him : that during the reign 
of Claudius IL, probably in the year 270, he 
was ' first beaten with heavy clubs, and then 
beheaded ' ; and likewise that he was a man 
of exceptional chastity of character — a fact 

46 



GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE 47 

that "iiay be considered no less paradoxical 
in regard to his genial reputation. He was 
certainly the last man to have been the 
patron saint of young blood, and if he has 
any cognisance of the frivolities done in his 
name, the knowledge must be more painful 
to him than all the clubs of Claudius. 
Unhappy saint ! To have his good name 
murdered also ! To be, through all time, the 
high-priest of that very ' paganism ' which he 
died to repudiate : the one most potent 
survival throughout Christian times of the 
joyous old order he would fain supplant ! 
Could anything be more characteristic of the 
whimsical humour of Time, which loves 
nothing better than to make a laughing-stock 
of human symbolism ? The savage putting 
a stray dress-coat to solemn sacerdotal usage, 
or taking some blackguard of a Mulvaney 
for a very god, is not more absurd than 
mankind thus ignorantly bringing to this 
poor martyr throughout the years the very 
last offering he can have desired. Surely it 
must have filled his shade with a strange 
bewilderment to have watched us year by 
year bringing him garlands and the sweet 



48 PROSE FANCIES 

incense of young love, to have seen this gay 
company approach his shrine with laughter 
and roses, a very bacchanal, where he had 
looked for sympathetic sackcloth and ashes 
— surely it must have all seemed a silly 
sacrilegious jest. However, he is long since 
slandered beyond all hope of restitution. So 
long as the spring moves in the blood, lovers 
will doubtless continue to take his name in 
vain, and feign his saintly sanction for their 
charming indiscretions. Indeed, he is fabled 
by the poets to be responsible for the billing 
and cooing of the whole creation. Everybody 
knows that the birds, too, pair on St. Valen- 
tine's Day. We have many a poet's word for 
it Donne's charming lines, for instance : 

* All the air is thy diocese, 
And alJ the chirping choristers 
And other birds are thy parishioners : 
Thou marriest every year 

The lyrique lark, and the grave whispering dove. 
The sparrow, that neglects his life for love, 
The household bird with the red stomacher ; 
Thou mak'st the blackbird speed as soon 
As doth the goldfinch or the halcyon.' 

In fact, it would appear that St. Valentine 
was, literally, a hedge-priest. 



GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE 49 

But do lovers, one wonders, still observe 
his ancient, though mistaken, rites ? Do they 
still have a care whose pretty face they 
should first set eyes upon on Valentine's 
morning, like Mistress Pepys, who kept 
her eyes closed the whole forenoon lest they 
should portend a misalliance with one of 
those tiresome ' paynters ' at work on the 
gilding of the pictures and the chimney- 
piece? Or do they with throbbing hearts 

* draw ' for the fateful name, or, weighting 
little inscribed slips of paper with lead or 
breadcrumbs, and dropping them into a basin 
of water, breathlessly await the name that 
shall first float up to the surface ? Do they 
still perform that terrible feat of digestion, 
which consisted of eating a hard-boiled ^g<gy 
shell and all, to inspire the presaging dream, 
and pin five bay-leaves upon their pillows to 
make it the surer ? 

We are told they do, these happy super- 
stitious lovers, though probably the practices 
obtain now mostly among a class of fair 
maids who have none of Mrs. Pepys' fears of 

* paynters,' and who are not averse even from 
a bright young plumber. Indeed, it is to 



so PROSE FANCIES 

be feared that the one sturdy survival of St. 
Valentine is to be sought in the ' ugly valen- 
tine.' This is another of Time's jests : to 
degrade the beautiful and distinguished, and 
mock at old-time sanctities with coarse 
burlesque. We see it constantly in the 
fortunes of old streets and squares, once 
graced with the beau and the sedan-chair, 
the very cynosure of the polite and elegant 
world, but now vocal with the clamorous 
wrongs of the charwoman and the melancholy 
appeal of the coster. We see it, too, in the 
ups and downs of words once aristocratic or 
tender, words once the very signet of polite 
conversation, now tossed about amid the very 
offal of language. We see it when some 
noble house, an illustrious symbol of heroic 
honour, the ark of high traditions, finds its 
reductio ad absurdum in some hare-brained 
turf-lord, who defiles its memories as he sells 
its pictures. But no lapse could be more 
pitiful than the end of St. Valentine, Once 
the day on which great gentlemen and great 
ladies exchanged stately and, as Pepys 
frequently complained, costly compliments ; 
when the ingenuity of love tortured itself for 



GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE 51 

the sweetest conceit wherein to express the 
very sweetest thing ; the May-day of the 
heart, when the very birds were Cupid's 
messengers, and all the world wore ribbons 
and made pretty speeches. What is it now ? 
The festival of the servants' hall. It is the 
sacred day set apart for the cook to tell the 
housemaid, in vividly illustrated verse, that 
she need have no fear of the policeman 
thinking twice of her ; for the housemaid to 
make ungenerous reflections on 'cookey's' 
complexion and weight, and to assure that 

* queen of the larder ' that it is not her, but 
her puddings, that attract the constabulary 
heart. It is the day when inoffensive little 
tailors receive anonymous letters beginning 

* You silly snip,' when the baker is unplea- 
santly reminded of his immemorial sobriquet 
of * Daddy Dough,' and coarse insult breaks 
the bricklayer's manly heart. Perhaps 
of all its symbols the most typical and 
popular are : a nursemaid, a perambulator 
enclosing twins, and a gigantic dragoon. 
In fact, we are faced by this curious de- 
velopment — that the day once sacred to 
universal compliment is now mainly dedi- 



52 PROSE FANCIES 

cated to low and foolish insult. Oh, that 
whirligig ! 

Do true lovers still remember the day to 
keep it holy, one wonders ? Does Ophelia 
still sing beneath the window, and do the 
love-birds still carry on their celestial post- 
age ? One fears that all have gone with the 
sedan-chair, the stage-coach, and last year's 
snow. Will the true lovers go next ? But, 
indeed, a florist told us that he had sold 
many flowers for ' valentines ' this year, and 
that the prettier practice of sending flowers 
was, he thought, supplanting the tawdry and 
stereotyped offering of cards. Which reminds 
one of an old verse : 

* The violet made haste to appear, 

To be her bosom guest, 
With first primrose that grew this year 
I purchas'd from her breast ; 
To me, 
Gave she, 
Her golden lock for mine ; 
My ring of jet 
For her bracelet, 
I gave my Valentine,^ 



IRRELEVANT PEOPLE 

There are numberless people who are, 
doubtless, of much interest and charm — in 
their proper context. That context we feel, 
however, is not our society. We have no 
objection to their carrying on the business of 
human beings, so long as they allow us an 
uninterrupted trading of, say, a hundred 
miles. Within that charmed and charming 
circle they should not set foot, and we are 
quite willing in addition, for them, to gird 
themselves about with the circumference of 
another thousand. It is not that they are 
disagreeable or stupid, or in any way 
obviously objectionable. Bores are more 
frequently clever than dull, and the only all- 
round definition of a bore is — The Person 
We Don't Want. Few people are bores at 
all times and places, and indeed one might 
venture on the charitable axiom : that when 

53 



54 PROSE FANCIES 

people bore us we are pretty sure to be 
boring them at the same time. The bore, to 
attempt a further definition, is simply a 
fellow human being out of his element. It 
is said by travellers from distant lands that 
fishes will not live out of water. It is a 
no less familiar fact that certain dull metals 
need to be placed in oxygen to show off 
their brilliant parts. So is it with the bore : 
set him in the oxygen of his native admir- 
ation, and he will scintillate like a human 
St. Catherine wheel, though in your society 
he was not even a Chinese cracker. Every 
man needs his own stage and his own 
audience. 

' Hath not love 
Made for all these their sweet particular air 
To shine in, their own beams and names to bear. 
Their ways to wander and their wards to keep, 
Till story and song and glory and all things sleep.* 

Mr. Swinburne asked the question of lovers, 
but perhaps it is none the less applicable to 
the bore or irrelevant person. Yet a third 
definition of the latter here suggests itself 
To be born for each other is, obviously, to 
be lovers. Well, not to be born for each 



IRRELEVANT PEOPLE 55 

other is to be bores. In future, let us not 
speak unkindly of the tame bore, let us say 
— ' We were not born for each other/ 

Relations do not, perhaps, invariably 
suggest the first line of * Endymion ' ; in- 
deed, they are, one fears, but infrequently 
celebrated in song. But the same word in 
the singular, how beautiful it is ! Relation ! 
In that little word is the whole secret of life. 
To get oneself placed in perfect harmony of 
relation with the world around us, to have 
nothing in our lives that we wouldn't buy, 
to possess nothing that is not sensitive to 
us, ready to ring a fairy chime of association 
at our slightest touch : no irrelevant book, 
picture, acquaintance, or activity — ah me ! 
you may well say it is an ideal. Yes, it is 
what men have meant by El Dorado, The 
Promised Land, and all such shy haunts of 
the Beatific Vision. Probably the quest of 
the Philosopher's Stone is not more wild. 
Yet men still seek that precious substitute 
for Midas. Brave spirits ! Unconquerable 
idealists ! Salt of the earth ! 

But if it be admitted that the quest of the 
Perfect Relation (in two senses) is hopeless, 



56 PROSE FANCIES 

yet there is no reason why we should not 
approach as near to it as we can. 

We can at least begin by barring the 
irrelevant person — in other words, choosing 
our own acquaintance. Of course, we have 
no entire free-will in so important a matter. 
Free-will is like the proverbial policeman, 
never there when most wanted. There are 
two classes of more or less irrelevant per- 
sons that cannot be entirely avoided : our 
blood-relations, and our business-relations 
— both often so pathetically distinct from 
our heart-relations and our brain-rela- 
tions. Well, our business-relations need not 
trouble us over much. They are not, as the 
vermin-killer advertisement has it, * pests of 
the household.' They come out only during 
business hours. The curse of the blood- 
relation, however, is that he infests your 
leisure moments ; and you must notice the 
pathos of that verbal distinction : man 
measures his toil by 'hours' (office-hours), 
his leisure by * moments ! ' 

But let not the reader mistake me for a 
Nero. The claims of a certain degree of 
blood-relationship I not only admit, but 



IRRELEVANT PEOPLE 57 

welcome as a sacred joy. Their experience 
is unhappy for whom the bonds of parentage, 
of sisterhood and brotherhood, will not 
always have a sort of involuntary religion. 
If a man should not exactly be tied to his 
mother's apron-string, he should all his life 
remain tied to her by that other mysterious 
cord which no knife can sever. Uncles and 
aunts may, under certain circumstances, be 
regarded as sacred, and meet for occasional 
burnt-offerings ; but beyond them I hold 
that the knot of blood-relationship may be 
regarded as Gordian, and ruthlessly cut. 
Cousins have no claims. Indeed, the scale of 
the legacy duties, like few legalities, follows 
the natural law. The further removed, the 
greater tax should our blood-relations pay 
for our love, or our legacy ; but the heart- 
relation, the brain-relation (' the stranger in 
blood'), he alone should go untaxed alto- 
gether ! Alas, the Inland Revenue Commis^ 
sioners would charge him more than any, 
which shows that their above-mentioned 
touch of nature was but a fluke, after all. 

It is impossible to classify the multi- 
tude of remaining irrelevancies, who, were 



58 PROSE FANCIES 

one to permit them, would fall upon our 
leisure like locusts ; but possibly ' friends 
of the family/ 'friends from the country,' 
and 'casuals' would include the most 
able-bodied. Sentiment apart, old school- 
fellows should, if possible, be avoided ; and 
no one who merely knew us when we were 
babies (really a very limited elementary 
acquaintance) and has mistaken us ever 
since should be admitted within the gates — 
though we might introduce him to our own 
baby as the nearest match. The child is not 
father to the man. It was a merely verbal 
paradox, which shows Wordsworth's ignor- 
ance of humanity. Let me especially warn 
the reader, particularly the newly-married 
reader, against the type of friend from the 
country who, so soon as they learn you have 
set up house in London, suddenly discovers 
an interest in your fortunes which, like 
certain rivers, has run underground further 
than you can remember. They write and 
tell you that they are thinking of coming to 
town, and would like to spend a few days 
with you. They leave their London address 
vague. It has the look of a blank which you 



IRRELEVANT PEOPLE 59 

are expected to fill up. You shrewdly sur- 
mise that, so to say, they meditate paying a 
visit to Euston, and spending a fortnight 
with you on the way. But if you are wise 
and subtle and strong, you cut this acquaint- 
ance ruthlessly, as you lop a branch. Such 
are the dead wood of your life. Cut it away 
and cast it into the oven of oblivion. Don't 
fear to hurt it. These people care as little 
for you, as you for them. All they want is 
board and lodging, and if you give in to 
them, you may be an amateur hotel-keeper 
all your days. 

Another * word to the newly-married.' Be 
not over-solicitous of wedding-presents. 
They carry a terrible rate of interest. A 
silver toast-rack will never leave you a Bank 
Holiday secure, and a breakfast service 
means at least a fortnight's ' change ' to one 
or more irrelevant persons twice a year. 
They have been known to stay a month 
on the strength of an egg-boiler. So, be 
warned, I pray you. Wedding-presents are 
but a form of loan, which you are expected 
to pay back, with compound interest at 50 
per cent., in * hospitality,' 'entertainment,' 



6o PROSE FANCIES 

and your still more precious time. For the 
givers of wedding-presents there is no more 
profitable form of investment. But you, be 
wise, and buy your own. 

There is a peculiar joy in snubbing irre- 
levant would-be country visitors. It is the 
svtT-eetest exercise of the will. Especially, 
too, if they are conceited persons who made 
sure of invitation. It adds a yet deeper 
thrill to the pleasure if you are able to invite 
some other friends near at hand, of humbler 
mind and greater interest, whose (maybe) 
shy charms are not flauntingly revealed. 
' Fancy So-and-So being invited ! I shouldn't 
have thought they had anything in common.' 
How sweet is the imagination of that 
wounded whisper. It makes you feel like a 
(German) prince. You have the power of 
making happy and (even better in some 
cases) unhappy, at least, as Carlyle would 
say, * to the extent of sixpence.' 

You have tasted the sweets of choosing 
your own friends, and snubbing the others. 
You have gone so far towards the attainment 
of the harmonious environment, the Perfect 
Relation. Your friends shall be as carefully 



IRRELEVANT PEOPLE 6i 

selected, shall mean as much to you as your 
books and flowers and pictures ; and your 
leisure shall be a priest's garden, in which 
none but the chosen may walk. 

Yet, in spite of my little burst of Neroics, 
I am far from advising a cruel treatment of 
the Irrelevant Person. Let us not forget 
what we said at the beginning, that he is 
probably an interesting person in the wrong 
place. He has taken the wrong turning — 
into your company. Do unto him as you 
would he might do unto you. Direct him 
aright— that is to say, out of it ! Remem- 
ber, we are all bores in certain uncongenial 
social climates : all stars in our own particu- 
lar milky way. So, remember, don't be 
cruel — as a rule — to the Irrelevant Person ; 
but just smile your best at him, and whisper : 
* We were not born for each other/ 



THE DEVILS ON THE 

NEEDLE 

... * these things are life : 
And life, some say, is worthy of the muse.' 

I 

There is a famous query of the old school- 
man at which we have all flung a jest in our 
time : How many angels can dance on the 
point of a needle? In a world with so many- 
real troubles it seems, perhaps, a little idle 
to worry too long over the question. Yet 
in the mere question, putting any answer 
outside possibility, there is a wonderful 
suggestiveness, if it has happened to come 
to you illuminated by experience. It be- 
comes a little clearer, perhaps, if we sub- 
stitute devils for angels. A friend of mine 
used always to look at it thus inversely 
when he quarrelled with his wife. Forgive 
so many enigmas to start with, but it was 



THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE 6^ 

this way. They never quarrelled more than 
three times a year, and it was always on the 
very smallest trifle, one particular trifle too. 
On the great things of life they were at one. 
It was but a tiny point, a needle's end of 
difference, on which they disagreed, and it 
was on that needle's end that the devils 
danced. All the devils of hell, you would 
have said. At any rate, you would have no 
longer wondered why the old philosopher 
put so odd a question, for you had only to 
see little Dora's face lit up with fury over 
that ridiculous trifle to have exclaimed : * Is 
it possible that so many devils can dance on 
a point where there seems hardly footing for 
a frown } ' 

However, so it was, and when I tell you 
what the needle's end was, you will probably 
not think me worth a serious person's 
attention. That I shall, of course, regret, 
but it was simply this : Dora would write 
with a * J ' pen — for which it was William's 
idiosyncrasy to have an unconquerable 
aversion. She might, you will think, have 
given way to her husband on so absurd a 
point, a mere pen-point of disagreement. 



64 PROSE FANCIES 

He was the tenderest of husbands in every 
other point. There is nothing that love 
can dream that he was not capable of 
doing for his wife's sake. But, on the 
other hand, it was equally true that there 
can be no other wife in the world more 
devoted than Dora ; with her also there 
was nothing too hard for love's sake. Could 
he not waive so ridiculous a blemish } It 
was little enough for love to achieve, 
surely. Yes, strange as it seems, their love 
was equal to impossible heroisms : to have 
died for each other had been easy, but to 
surrender this pen-point was impossible. 
And, alas ! as they always do, the devils 
found out this needle's end — and danced. 
For their purpose it was as good as a plat- 
form. It gave them joy indeed to think 
what stupendous powers of devilry they 
could concentrate on so tiny a stage. 

It was a sad thing, too, that Dora and 
William were able to avoid the subject three 
hundred and sixty-four days of the year, but 
on that odd day it was sure to crop up. 
Perhaps they had been out late the night 
before, and their nerves were against them. 



THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE 65 

The merest accident would bring it on. 
Dora would ask William to post a letter for 
her in town. Being out of sorts and sus- 
ceptible to the silliest irritation, he would 
not be able to resist criticising the addres- 
sing. If he didn't mention it, Dora would 
notice his 'expression.' That would be 
* quite enough,' you may be sure. Half the 
tragedies of life depend on ' expression.' 

* Well ! ' she v/ould say. 

' Well what ? ' he would answer, already 
beginning to tremble. 

* You have one of your critical moods on 
again.' 

' Not at all. What 's the matter ? ' 

' You have, I say. . . . Well, why do you 

look at the envelope in that way ? I know 

what it is, well enough.' 

* If you know, dear, why do you ask ? * 

* Don't try to be sarcastic, dear. It is so 
vulgar.' 

* I hadn't the least intention of being so.' 
' Yes, you had. . . . Give me that letter.' 

* All right' 

*Yes, you admire every woman's writing 
but your wife's.' 

E 



66 PROSE FANCIES 

* Don't be silly, dear. See, I don't feel 
very well this morning. I don't want to be 
angry.' 

* Angry ! Be angry ; what does it matter 
to me ? Be as angry as you like. I wish I 
had never seen you.' 

* Somewhat of a non sequitur^ is it not, my 
love?' 

* Don't " my love " me. With your nasty 
cool sarcasm ! ' 

' Isn't it better to try and keep cool rather 
than to fly into a temper about nothing? 
See, I know you are a little nervous this 
morning. Let us be friends before I go.' 

* I have no wish to be friends/ 

* Dora ! ' 

William would then lace his boots, and 
don his coat in silence, before making a final 
effort at reconciliation. 

* Well, dear, good-bye. Perhaps you will 
love me again by the time I get home.' 

' Perhaps I shan't be here when you come 
home.' 

* For pity's sake, don't begin that silly 
nonsense, Dora.' 

* It isn't silly nonsense. I say again — I 



THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE 67 

mayn't be here when you come home, and I 
mean it.' 

* Oh, all right then. Suppose I were to 
say that I won't come home ? ' 

* I should be quite indifferent.' 
' Oh, Dora ! ' 

* I would. I am weary of our continual 
quarrels. I can bear this life no longer.' (It 
was actually sunny as a summer sky.) 

* Why, it was only last night you said how 
happy we were.' 

* Yes, but I didn't mean it.' 

* Didn't mean it ! Don't talk like that, or 
I shall lose myself completely.' 

* You will lose your train if you don't 
mind. Don't you think you had better go ? ' 

* Can you really talk to me like that?— 
me? — Oh, Dora, it is not you that is talking: 
it is some devil in you.' 

Then suddenly irritated beyond all control 
by her silly little set face, he would blurt out 
a sudden, ' Oh, very well, then ! ' and before 
she was aware of it, the door would have 
banged. By the time William had reached 
the gate he would be half-way through with 
a deed of assignment in favour of his wife, 



68 PROSE FANCIES 

who, now that he had really gone, would 
watch him covertly from the window with 
slowly thawing heart. 

So the devils would begin their dance: 
for it was by no means ended. Of course, 
William would come home as usual ; and 
yet, though the sound of his footstep was 
the one sound she had listened for all day, 
Dora would immediately begin to petrify 
again, and when he would approach her 
with open arms, asking her to forgive and 
forget the morning, she would demur just 
long enough to set him alight again. Heaven, 
how the devils would dance then ! And the 
night would usually end with them lying 
sleepless in distant beds. 

II 

To attempt tragedy out of such absurd 
material is, you will say, merely stupid. 
Well, I 'm sorry. I know no other way to 
make it save life's own, and I know that the 
tragedy of William's life hung upon a silly 
little ink-stamed * J ' pen. I would pretend 
that it was made of much more grandiose 
material if I could. But the facts are as I 



THE DEVILS ON THE NEEDLE 69 

shall tell you. And surely if you fulfil that 
definition of man which describes him as a 
reflective being, if you ever think on life at 
all, you must have noticed how even the 
great tragedies that go in purple in the 
great poets all turn on things no less trifling 
in themselves, all come of people pretending 
to care for some bauble more than they 
really do. 

And you must have wondered, too, as you 
stood awestruck before the regal magni- 
ficence, the radiant power, the unearthly 
beauty, of those glorious and terrible angels 
of passion— that splendid creature of wrath, 
that sorrow wonderful as a starlit sky— you 
must have wondered that life has not given 
these noble elementals material worthier of 
their fiery operation than the paltry concerns 
of humanity ; just as you may have wondered 
too, that so god-like a thing as fire should 
find nothing worthier of its divine fury than 
the ugly accumulations of man. 

At any rate, I know that all the sorrow 
that saddens, sanctifies, and sometimes 
terrifies my friend, centres round that silly 
little 7 ' pen. The difference is that the 



70 PROSE FANCIES 

angels dance on its point now, instead of the 
devils ; but it is too late. 

A night of unhappiness had ended once 
more as I described. The long darkness had 
slowly passed, and morning, sunny with 
forgiveness, had come at length. William's 
heart yearned for his wife in the singing of 
the birds. He would first slip down into 
the garden and gather her some fresh 
flowers, then steal with them into the room 
and kiss her little sulky mouth till she 
awoke ; and, before she remembered their 
sorrow, her eyes would see the flowers. 

It was a lover's simple thought, sweeter 
even than the flowers he had soon gathered. 

But, then, reader, why tease you with 
transparent secrets ? You know that Dora 
could not smell the flowers. 

You know that Death had come to dance 
with the devils that night, and that Dora 
and William would quarrel about little *J' 
pens no more for ever. 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 



A SERIOUS theme demands serious treat- 
ment. Let us, therefore, begin with defini- 
tions. What is a poet? and what is a 
pubUsher ? Popularly speaking, a poet is a 
fool, and a publisher is a knave. At least, 
I am hardly wrong in saying that such is 
the literal assumption of the Incorporated 
Society of Authors, a body well acquainted 
with both. Indeed, that may be said to be 
its working hypothesis, the very postulate 
of its existence. 

Of course, there are other definitions of 
both. It is not so the maiden of seventeen 
defines a poet, as she looks up to him with 
brimming eyes in the summer sunset and 
calls him 'her Byron.' It is not so the 
embryo Chatterton defines him, chained to 
an office stool in some sooty provincial 

71 



72 PROSE FANCIES 

town, dreaming of Fleet Street as of a 
shining thoroughfare in the New Jerusalem, 
where move authors and poets, angelic 
beings, in 'solemn troops and sweet socie- 
ties.* For, indeed, was that not the dream 
of all of us ? For my part, I remember my 
first, most beautiful, delusion, was that poets 
belonged only to the golden prime of 
the world, and that, like miracles, they had 
long ceased before the present age. And I 
very well recall my curious bewilderment 
when, one day in a bookseller's, a friendly 
schoolmaster took up a new volume of Mr. 
Swinburne's and told me that it was by the 
new great poet. How wonderful that little 
incident made the world for me ! Real 
poets actually existing in this unromantic 
to-day ! If you had told me of a mermaid, 
or a wood-nymph, or of the philosopher's 
stone as apprehensible wonders, I should 
not have marvelled more. While a single 
poet existed in the land, who could say 
that the kingdom of Romance was all let 
out in building lots, or that the steam 
whistle had quite ' frighted away the Dryads 
and the Fauns.* 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 73 
Since then I have taken up the reviewing 
of minor verse as a part of my livelihood, 
and where I once saw the New Jerusalem 
I see now the New Journalism. 

There are, doubtless, many who still cherish 
that boyish dream of the poet. He still 
stalks through the popular imagination with 
his Spanish hat and cloak, his amaranthine 
locks, his finely-frenzied eyes, and his Alas- 
tor-like forgetfulness of his meals.. But only, 
it is to be feared, for a little time. For the 
latter-day poet is doing his best to dissipate 
that venerable tradition. Bitten by the 
modern passion for uniformity, he has 
French-cropped those locks, in which, as 
truly as with Samson, lay his strength, he 
has discarded his sombrero for a Lincoln 
and Bennett, he cultivates a silky moustache, 
a glossy boot, and has generally given him- 
self into the hands of the West-End tailor. 
Stung beyond endurance by taunts of his 
unpracticality, he enters Parliament, edits 
papers, keeps accounts, and is in every way 
a better business man than his publisher. 

This is all very well for a little time. The 
contrast amuses by its piquancy. To write 



74 PROSE FANCIES 

of wild and whirling things in your books, 
but in public life to be associated with 
nothing more wild and whirling than a 
shirt-fronted eye-glassed hansom ; to be 
at heart an Alastor, but in appearance a 
bank-clerk, delights an age of paradox. 

But, though it may pay for a while, it 
will, I am sure, prove a disastrous policy 
in the long run. The poet unborn shall, I 
am certain, rue it. The next generation of 
poets (or, indeed, writers generally) will reap 
a sorrowful harvest from the gratuitous dis- 
illusionment, with which the present genera- 
tion is so eager to indulge the curiosity, and 
flatter the mediocrity, of the public. The 
public, like the big baby it is, is continually 
crying * to see the wheels go round,' and for 
a time the exhibition of, so to say, the 
'works' of poet and novelist is profitable. 
But a time will come when, with its curiosity 
sated, the public will turn upon the poet, 
and throw into his face, on his own authority, 
that he is but as they are, that his airs of 
inspiration and divine right are humbug. 
And in that day the poet will block his silk 
hat, will shave away the silken moustache. 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 75 

will get him a bottle of Mrs. Allen's Hair 
Restorer, and betake himself to the sombrero 
of his ancestors — but it will be all too late. 
The cat will have been irrecoverably let out 
of the bag, the mystery of the poet as 
exploded as the mysteries of Eleusis. 

Tennyson knew better. To use the word 
in its mediaeval sense, he respected the 
'mystery' of poetry. Instinctively, doubt- 
less, but also, I should imagine, deliberately, 
he all his life lived up to the traditional 
type of the poet, and kept between him and 
his public a proper veil of Sinaitic mist. 
You remember Browning's picture of the 
mysterious poet * you saw go up and down 
Valladolid,' and the awestruck rumours 
that were whispered about him — how, for 
instance — 

' If you tracked him to his home, down lanes 
Beyond the Jewry, and as clean to pace, 
You found he ate his supper in a room 
Blazing with lights, four Titians on the wall, 
And twenty naked girls to change his plate ! ' 

That is the kind of thing the public likes to 
hear of its poets. That is something like 
a poet. Inquisitive the public always will 
be, but it is a mistake to indulge rather 



76 PROSE FANCIES 

than to pique its curiosity. Tennyson 
respected the wishes of his public in this 
matter, and, not only in his dress and his 
dramatic seclusion, but surely in his obstin- 
ate avoidance of prose-work of any kind 
we have a subtler expression of his careful- 
ness for fame. It is a mistake for a poet 
to write prose, however good, for it is a 
charming illusion of the public that, com- 
paratively speaking, any one can write prose. 
It is an earthly accomplishment, it is as 
walking is to flying — is it not stigmatised 
* pedestrian ? ' Now, your true Bird of 
Paradise, which is the poet, must, meta- 
phorically speaking, have no legs — as 
Adrian Harley said was the case with 
the women in Richard Feverel's poems. 
He must never be seen to walk in prose, 
for his part is, 'pinnacled dim in the 
intense inane,' to hang aloft and warble the 
unpremeditated lay, without erasure or blot. 
This is, I am sure, not fanciful, for two or 
three modern instances, which I am far too 
considerate to name, illustrate its truth. 
Unless you are a very great person indeed, 
the surest way to lose a reputation as poet 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 77 

is to gain one as critic. It is true that for 
a time one may help the other, and that if 
you are very fecund, and let your poetical 
issues keep pace with your critical, you may 
even avoid the catastrophe altogether ; but 
it is an unmistakable risk, and if in the 
end you are not catalogued as a great critic, 
you will assuredly be set down as a minor 
poet : whereas if you had stuck to your last, 
there is no telling what fame might not have 
been yours. Limitation, not versatility, is 
the fashion to-day. The man with the one 
talent, not the five, is the hero of the hour. 

Besides, this sudden change of his spots 
on the part of the poet is unfair to the 
publisher, who is thus apt to find himself 
surprised out of his just gain. For, at the 
present moment, I would back almost any 
poet of my acquaintance against any pub- 
lisher in a matter of business. This is 
unfair, for the publisher is a being slow to 
move, slow to take in changed conditions, 
always two generations, at least, behind his 
authors. Consequently, this sudden develop- 
ment of capacity on the part of the poet is 
liable to take him linprepared, and the mere 



7^ PROSE FANCIES 

apparition of a poet who can add up a 
pounds shillings and pence column offhand 
might well induce apoplexy. Yet it is to be 
feared that that providence which arms 
every evil thing with its fang, has so pro- 
tected the publisher with an instinctive 
dread of verse in any form, and especially 
in manuscript, that he has, after all, little 
to fear from the poet's new gifts. 

II 

But, indeed, my image just now was both 
uncomplimentary and unjust : for, parallel 
with the change in the poet to which I have 
referred, a still more unnatural change is 
making itself apparent in the type of the 
publisher. It would almost seem as if the 
two are changing places. Instead of the poet 
humbly waiting, hat in hand, kicking his 
heels for half-a-day in the publisher's office, 
it is the publisher who seeks him, who writes 
for appointments at his private house, or in- 
vites him to dinner. Yet it behoves the poet 
to be on his guard. A publisher, like another 
personage, has many shapes of beguile- 
ment, and it is not unlikely that this flatter- 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 79 
ing deference is but another wile to entrap 
the unwary. There is no way of circumvent- 
ing the dreamer so subtle as to flatter his 
business qualities. We all like to be praised 
for the something we cannot do. It is for 
this reason that Mr. Stevenson interferes with 
Samoan politics, when he should be writing 
romances — just the desire of the dreamer to 
play the man of action. 

But I am not going to weary you by 
indulging in the stale old diatribes against 
the publisher. For, to speak seriously the 
honest truth, I think they are in the main a 
very much abused race. Thackeray put the 
matter with a good deal of common-sense, in 
that scene in ' Pendennis,' where Pen and 
Warrington walk home together from the 
Fleet prison, after hearing Captain Shandon 
read that brilliant prospectus of the Pall Mall 
Gazette, which he had written for bookseller 
Bungay, and for which that gentleman dis- 
bursed him a £^ note on the spot Pen, you 
will remember, was full of the oppressions of 
genius, of Apollo being tied down to such an 
Admetus as Bungay Warrington, however, 
took a maturer view of the matter. 



8o PROSE FANCIES 

'A fiddlestick ■ about men of genius!' he 
exclaimed, * I deny that there are so many 
geniuses as people who whimper about the 
fate of men of letters assert there are. There 
are thousands of clever fellows in the world 
who could, if they would, turn verses, write 
articles, read books, and deliver a judgment 
upon them ; the talk of professional critics 
and writers is not a whit more brilliant, or 
profound, or amusing than that of any other 
society of educated people. If a lawyer, or a 
soldier, or a parson outruns his income, and 
does not pay his bills, he must go to gaol ; 
and an author must go too^ If an author 
fuddles himself, I don't know why he should 
be let off a headache the next morning — if 
he orders a coat from the tailor's, why he 
shouldn't pay for it. . . .' 

Dr. Johnson, who had no great reason 
to be prejudiced in their favour, defined 
booksellers as * the patrons of literature,' and 
M. Anatole France has recently said that *a 
great publisher is a kind of Minister for belles- 
lettres! Such definitions are, doubtless, pro- 
phecies of the ideal rather than descriptions of 
the actual. Yet, fairly dealt with, the history 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 8i 

of publishing would show a much nearer 
living up to them on the part of publishers 
than the poets and their sentimental sym- 
pathisers are inclined to admit. We hear 
a great deal of Milton getting £io for Para- 
dise Losty and the Tonsons riding in their 
carriage, but seldom of Cottle adventuring 
thirty guineas on Coleridge's early poems, or 
the Jacksons giving untried boys ;f lO — or, 
according to some accounts, ;^20 — for Poems 
by Two Brothers. 

To open the case for the bookseller or the 
publisher. The poet, to start with, bases his 
familiar complaints on a wilful disregard of 
the relation which poetry bears to average 
humanity. You often hear him express 
indignant surprise that the sale of butcher's 
meat should be a more lucrative business 
than the sale of poetry. But, surely, to argue 
thus is to manifest a most absurd misappre- 
hension of the facts of life. Wordsworth says 
that Sve live by admiration, joy, and love.' 
So doubtless we do : but we live far more 
by butcher's meat and Burton ale. Poetry is 
but a preparation of opium distilled by a 
minority for a minority. The poet may test 



82 PROSE FANCIES 

the case by the relative amounts he pays his 
butcher and his bookseller. So far as I know, 
he pays as little for his poetry as possible, 
and never buys a volume by a brother-singer 
till he has vainly tried six different ways to 
get a presentation copy. The poet seems 
incapable of mastering the rudimentary truth 
that ethereals must be based on materials. 
* No song, no supper ' is the old saw. It is 
equally true reversed — no supper, no song. 
The empty-stomach theory of creation is a 
cruel fallacy, though undoubtedly hunger has 
sometimes been the spur which the clear soul 
doth raise. 

The conditions of existence compel the 
publisher to be a tradesman on the same 
material basis as any other. Ideally, a poem, 
like any other beautiful thing, is beyond 
price ; but, practically, its value depends on 
the number of individuals who can be 
prevailed upon to purchase it. In its ethereal 
— otherwise its unprinted — state, it is only 
subject to the laws of the celestial ether, one 
of which is that it yields no money ; properly 
speaking, money is there an irrelevant condi- 
tion. Byron, you remember, would not for 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 83 

a long time accept any money from Murray 
for his poems, successful as they were. He 
had a proper sense of the indignity of selling 
the children of his soul. The incongruity is 
much as though we might go to Portland 
Road and buy an angel, just as we buy a 
parrot. The transactions of poetry and of sale 
are on two different planes. But so soon as, 
shall we say, you debase poetry by bringing 
it down to the lower plane, it becomes 
subject to the laws of that plane. An un- 
printed poem is a spiritual thing, but a 
printed poem is subject to the laws of matter. 
In the heaven of the poet's imagination there 
are no printers and paper-makers, no binders, 
no discounts to the trade and thirteen to the 
dozen ; but on earth, where alone, so far as 
we know, books exist, these terrestrial beings 
and conditions are of paramount importance, 
and cannot be ignored. It may be perfectly 
true that a certain poem is so fine that, in a 
properly constituted cosmogony, it ought to 
support you to the end of your days ; but is 
the publisher to blame because, in spite of 
its manifest genius, he can sell no more 
than 500 copies ? 



84 PROSE FANCIES 

Then, to take another point of view, it is, I 
think, quite demonstrable that, compared 
with the men of many other callings, a poet 
who can get his verses accepted is very well 
paid Take a typical instance. You spend 
an absolutely beatific evening with Clarinda 
in the moonlit woodland. You go home 
and relieve your emotions in a sonnet, which, 
we will say, at a generous allowance, takes 
you half-an-hour to write. Next morning 
in that cold calculating mood for which no 
business man can match a poet, you copy it 
out fair and send it to a friendly editor. 
Perhaps out of Clarinda alone you beget a 
sonnet a week, which at £2^ 2s. a week is 
;£"i09,4s. a year — not to speak of Phyllis and 
Dulcinea. At any rate, take that one sonnet. 
For an evening with Clarinda, for which 
alone you would have paid the sum, and for 
a beggarly half-hour's work, you receive as 
much as many a City clerk earns by six hard 
days' work, eight hours to the dreary day, 
with perhaps a family to keep and a railway 
contract to pay for. Half-an-hour's work, and 
if you can live on £2, 2s. a week, the rest of 
your time is free as air! Moreover, you have 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 85 
the option of going about with a feeling that 
you are a being vastly superior to your 
fellows, because forsooth you can string 
fourteen lines together in decent Petrarcan 
form, and they cannot. And to return for a 
moment to Clarinda : it seems to me that 
your publisher, with all his ill-gotten gains, 
compares favourably with you in your treat- 
ment of your partner in the production 
of that sonnet. What about the woman's 
half-profits in the matter ? For, remember, 
if the publisher depends on the brains of the 
poet, the poet is no less dependent on the 
heart of the woman. It is from woman, in 
nine cases out of ten, that the poets have 
drawn their inspiration. And how have 
they, in eight cases out of this nine, treated 
her ? The story is but too familiar. Will 
It always seem so much worse to pick a 
man's brains than to break a woman's heart ? 
Wc touched just now on the arrogance of 
the poet. It is one of the most foolish and 
distasteful of his faults, and one which unfor- 
tunately the world has conspired from time 
immemorial to confirm. He has been too 
long the spoiled child, too long allowed to 



86 PROSE FANCIES 

think that anything becomes him, too long 
allowed to ride rough-shod over the neck oi 
the average man. 

Mrs. Browning, In Aurora Leigh, while 
celebrating the poet, sneers at * your common 
men ' who ' lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, 
reign, reap, dine.' But why ? All these — 
with, perhaps, the exception of reigning — 
are very proper and necessary things to be 
done, and any one of them, done in the 
true spirit of work, is every bit as dignified 
as the writing of poetry, and often, I am 
afraid, a great deal more so. This scorn of 
the common man is but another instance of 
the poet's ignorance of the facts of life and 
the relations of things. The hysterical bitter- 
ness with which certain sections of modern 
people of taste are constantly girding at the 
bourgeois — which, indeed, as Omar Khayyam 
says, heeds ' As the sea's self should heed a 
pebble-cast ' — is one of the most melancholy 
of recent literary phenomena. It was not 
so the great masters treated the common 
man, nor any full-blooded age. But the 
torch of taste has for the moment fallen Into 
the hands of little men, anaemic and atra- 



POETS AND PUBLISHERS 87 

bilious, with neither laughter nor pity in 
their hearts. 

Besides, how easy it is to misjudge your 
so-called * common man/ That fat undis- 
tinguished-looking Briton in the corner of 
the omnibus is as likely as not Mr. So-and- 
So, the distinguished poet ; and who but 
those with the divining-rod of a kind heart 
know what refined sensibility and nobility of 
character may lurk under an extremely 
bourgeois exterior ? 

We live in an age of every man his own 
priest and his own lawyer. At a pinch 
we can very well be every man his own 
poet. If the whole supercilious crew of 
modern men of letters, artists, and critics 
were wiped off the earth to-morrow, the 
world would be hardly conscious of the loss. 
Nay, if even the entire artistic accumulation 
of the past were to be suddenly swallowed up, 
it would be little worse off. For the world 
is more beautiful and wonderful than any- 
thing that has ever been written about it, and 
the most glorious picture is not so beautiful 
as the face of a spring morning. 



APOLLO'S MARKET 

The question is sometimes asked — * Hwv 
poets sell ? ' One feels inclined idealistically 
to ask, * Ought poets to sell ? ' What can 
poets want with money ? — dear children of 
the rainbow, who from time immemorial 



... on honeydew have fed 
And drunk the milk of Paradise. 



Have you never felt a sort of absurdity in 
paying for a rose — especially if you paid in 
copper? To pay for a thing of beauty in 
coin of extreme ugliness ! There is obviously 
no equality of exchange in the transaction. 
In fact, it is little short of an insult to the 
flower-girl to pretend that you thus satisfy 
the obligation. Far better let her give it 
you — for the love of beauty — as very likely, 
if you explained the incongruity, she would 
be glad to do : for flower-girls, no doubt, like 



APOLLO'S MARKET 89 

every one else, can only have chosen their 
particular profession because of its being a 
joy for ever. There might be fitness in 
offering a kiss on account, though that, of 
course, would depend on the flower-girl. To 
buy other things with flowers were not so 
incongruous. I have often thought of trying 
my tobacconist with a tulip; and certainly 
an orchid — no very rare one either — should 
cover one's household expenses for a week, 
if not a fortnight. 

Omar Khayyam used to wonder what 
the vintners buy 'one half so precious as 
the stuff they sell.' It is surely natural to 
wonder in like manner of the poet. What 
have we to offer in exchange for his price- 
less manna? One feels that he should be 
paid on the mercantile principles of * Goblin 
Market.' Said Laura : — 



'Good folk, I have no coin ; 
To take were to purloin ; 
I have no copper in my purse, 
I have no silver either. . . ' 



Copper ! silver even ! The goblin-men were 
more artistic than that ; they realised the 



go PROSE FANCIES 

absurdity of paying for immortal things in 
coin of mere mortality. So : — 

* You have much gold upon your head/ 

They answered all together : 

* Buy from us with a golden curl. ' 

Yes, those are the ideal rates at which poetry 
should be paid. We should, of course, pay 
for fairy goods in fairy-gold. 

One of the few such appropriate trans- 
actions I remember was Queen Elizabeth's 
buying a poem from Sir Philip Sidney, 
literally, with a lock of her 'gowden hair.' 
Poem and lock now lie together at Wilton, 
both untouched of time. Or was it that Sir 
Philip Sidney paid for the lock with his 
poem? However it was, the exchange was 
appropriate. The ratio between the thing 
sold and the price given was fairly equal. 
And, at all times, it is far less absurd for 
a poet to pay for the earthly thing with 
his poem (thus leaving us to keep the 
change), than that we should think to pay 
him for his incorruptible with our corruptible. 
There would, no doubt, be a subtle element 
of absurdity in a poet consenting to pay his 



APOLLO'S MARKET 91 

tailor for a suit with a sonnet, while it 
would obviously be beyond all proportion 
monstrous for a tailor to think to buy a 
sonnet with a suit. Yet a poet might, 
perhaps, be brought to consider the trans- 
action, if he chanced to be of a gentle 
disposition. 

Yes, the true, the tasteful way to pay 
a poet is by the exchange of some other 
beautiful thing : by beautiful praise, by a 
beautiful smile, by a well-shaped tear, by a 
rose. It is thus that a poet — frequently, I 
am bound to confess — finds his highest 
reward. 

At the same time, there is a subtle ironic 
pleasure in taking the world's money for 
poetry — even though one pays it over to a 
charity immediately — for one feels that the 
world, for some reason or another, has been 
persuaded to buy something which it didn't 
really want, and which it will throw away so 
soon as we are round the corner. If the reader 
has ever published a volume of verse, he 
must often have chuckled with an unnatural 
glee over the number of absolutely unpoetic 
good souls who, from various motives — the 



92 PROSE FANCIES 

unhappy accident of relationship, perhaps — 
have * subscribed.' Most of us have sound 
unpoetic uncles. Of course, you make them 
buy you — in large-paper too. Have you ever 
gloatingly pictured their absolute bewilder- 
ment as, with a stern sense of family pride, 
they sit down to cut your pages ? Think of 
the poor souls thus ' moving about in worlds 
not realised.' 

A perfect instance of this cruelty to the 
Philistine occurs to me. The poet in ques- 
tion is one whose forte is children's poetry. 
Very tender some of his poems are. You 
will find them now and again in St. Nicholas^ 
and he is not unknown in this country. 
With a heart like a lamb for children, he 
is like a hawk upon the Philistine. I re- 
member an occasion, before he published 
a volume, when we were together in a 
tavern, in a country-town, a tavern thronged 
with farmers on market days. The poet had 
some prospectuses in his pocket. Suddenly 
a great John Bull would come bumping in 
like a cockchafer, and call for his pint. * Just 
you watch,' the poet would say, and away he 
crossed over to his victim. ' Good morning, 



APOLLO'S MARKET 93 

Mr. Oats ! ' ' Why, good morning, sir. 
How-d ye-do ; I hardly know'd thee.' Then 
presently the voice of the charmer unto the 
farmer — * Mr. Oats, you care for children, 
don't you?' *Ay, ay,' would answer the 
farmer, a little doubtfully, *when they're 
little'uns.' * Well you know I'm what they, 
call a poet.' To this Mr. Oats would 
respond with a good round laugh, as of a 
man enjoying a good thing. This was very 
subtle of the poet, for it put the farmer on 
good terms with himself He wondered, as 
he had his laugh over again, how a man 
could choose to be a poet, when he might 
have been a farmer. 'Well, I'm bringing 
out a book of poems all about children — here 
is one of them ! ' and the poet would read 
some humorous thing, such as * Breeching 
Tommy.' Then another — such simple 
pictures of humanity at the age of two, that 
the farmer could not but be moved to that 
primary artistic delight, the recognition of 
the familiar. Then the farmer would grow 
grave, as he always did at any approach to a 
purchase, however small, while the poet 
would rapidly speak of the fitness of the 



94 PROSE FANCIES 

volume as a present to the old woman : 
* Women cared for such things,' he would add 
pityingly. Then the farmer would cautiously 
ask the price, and blow his cheeks out in 
surprise on hearing that it was five shillings. 
He had never given so much for a book 
in his life. The poet would then insidiously 
suggest that by subscribing before publi- 
cation he would save a discount. This 
would arouse the farmer's instinct for getting 
things cheap ; and so, finally, with a little 
more * playing,' Mr. Timothy Oats, of Clod 
Hall, Salop, was landed high and dry on 
the subscription list — a list, by the way, 
which already included all the poet's 
tradesmen ! This is one example of * how 
poets sell' 

Yet over and above what we may term these 
forced sales, the demand for verse, we are 
assured, is growing. The impression to the 
contrary on the part of the Philistine is a 
delusion, a false security. And the demand, 
a well-known publisher has told us, is an 
intelligent one, for poetry of the markedly 
idealistic, or markedly realistic, kind : but to 
writers of the merely sentimental he can offer 



APOLLO'S MARKET 95 

no hope. Their golden age, a pretty long 
one while it lasted, has probably gone for 
ever. 

This is good news for those engaged in 
growing dreams for the London market 



THE 
'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION 

It must be very painful to the sentimentalist 
to notice what common sense is beginning 
to prevail on one of his pet subjects : that 
of the ancient immunities of 'genius.' Of 
course, to a great many good people genius 
continues still to be accepted as payment 
in full for every species of obligation, and if 
a man were a great poet he might probably 
still ruin a woman's life, and some, in secret 
at least would deem that he did God service. 
There are perhaps even more women than 
ever nowadays who would, as Keats put it, 
like to be married to an epic, and given 
away by a three-volume novel. Such an 
attitude, however, is more and more taking 
its place among the superstitions, and the 
divine right ot genius to ride rough-shod 
over us is at a discount. 

96 



THE 'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION 97 

At the same time, our national capacity 
for reaching right conclusions by the wrong 
course is in this matter once more exempli- 
fied. In the main, as usual, our reasoning 
seems to have been quite astray. We have 
argued as though for ourselves, and that on 
those lines we should have reached the same 
conclusion is somewhat surprising. Because, 
indeed, it does pay the world to allow 
genius to do its pleasure : its victims even 
have little to complain of; they wear the 
martyr's crown, and if a few tradesmen or a 
few women are the worse, it has been deemed 
just, time out of mind, that such should suffer 
for the people. But the one whom it does 
not pay, either in this world or the next, is 
emphatically the man of genius himself It is 
really on his behalf that the protest against 
his ancient immunities should be made, for 

* Whether a man serve God or his own whim 
Matters not much in the end to any one but him.' 

To take the threadbare instance, the 

world suffered nothing from the suicide of 

Harriet Westbrook : rather it gained by one 

more story of tragic pathos. Harriet her- 

G 



98 PROSE FANCIES 

self was no loser, for she had lived her dream, 
and the stern joy of a great sorrow was 
granted her to die with : it was only the sel- 
fish heart that could leave her thus to suffer 
and die that was the loser. Not in its rela- 
tions with the world, fair or ill — such, like all 
external things, are important only as we 
take them : but in its diminished capacity to 
feel greatly and tenderly, in its added numb- 
ness, in its less noble beat. It was thus that 
the cor cordium lost what no lyric passion, 
no triumphant exultation of success, could 
give to it again. 

However, Shelley and his story belong 
more or less to the tragic muse, and this sub- 
ject is, perhaps, rather more the property of 
the comic : for great poets are rare, and 
really it is the smaller genius we have 
always with us that is likely to suffer most 
from those * immunities ' ; still more the 
talent that would fain bear the greater name, 
and most of all the misguided industry 
which is neither the one nor the other. 

In this lower sphere, it is not murder and 
sudden death, and other such volcanic aber- 
rations, that call for condonation ; but those 



THE 'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION 99 

ofifences against that code of daily inter- 
course which some faulty observer of human 
life has characterised as * the minor morals.' 

The type of ' genius ' I am thinking of 
probably began life by a misapplication, to 
himself, of Emerson's essay on Self- Reliance: 
a great and beautiful essay, but Oh ! how 
much has it to answer for in the survival of 
the unfittest. Alas ! that the wheat and tares 
must grow together till the harvest. It is 
the syrup of phosphorus by which weakly 
mediocrity develops into sturdiness, a sturdy 
coarseness that else might have died down 
and been spared us. But, thanks to that or 
some other artificial fertiliser, it grows up 
with the idea that the duty which lies near- 
est to it is to write weary books, paint 
monotonous pictures, persevere in *d — d 
bad acting ' ; and it fulfils that duty with an 
energy known only to mediocrity. The 
literary variety, probably, has the characteris- 
tics of the type most fully developed. No 
one takes himself with more touching seri- 
ousness. Day by day he grows in conceit, 
neglects his temper, especially at home, with 
a wife who is worth ten of him and all his 

LOFC. 



100 PROSE FANCIES 

' works,' and generally behaves, as the phrase 
goes, * as if anything becomes him.' If you 
visit him enfamille^ you will find him especi- 
ally characteristic at meals, during which he 
is wont to sit absorbed, with an air of * I 
cannot shake off the god ' ; and when they 
are over he goes off, moodily chewing a 
toothpick, to his den, where, maybe, the 
genius finds vent in a dissertation on ' Peg- 
Tops,' for The Boy's Ow7i^ or ' The Noses of 
Great Men,' for Chambers' Journal. 

But if such genius as this be chiefly comic, 
its work cannot but awaken in one a deep 
sense of the pathetic. To stand before the 
poor little picture that has been so much to 
its painter, and yet holds no spark of vitality 
or touch of distinction ; to take up the 
poor little book into which all the oil of so 
many wasted days could breathe no breath 
of life, formless, uninspired, unnecessary. 
Think of the pathos of the illusion that has 
waved ' its purple wings ' around these lifeless 
products, endowing with sensitive expression 
the wooden lineaments that have really been 
dead and unexpressive all the time, never 
glowed at all save to the wistful yearning eye 



THE 'GENIUS' SUPERSTITION loi 

of their befooled creator. Yet if nature be 
thus cruel to afflict, she is no less kind to con- 
sole: for the victim of this species of halluci- 
nation seldom wakens from the dream. That 
essay on Self-Reliance is with him to the end. 
Yet no less pathetic is it to reflect 
how his whole development has suffered 
for this mistake, all his life-blood gone 
to feed this abortive thing. The gentler 
charities of life have been neglected, fine 
qualities atrophied, the man has grown 
narrow and selfish, all the real things have 
been lost for this shadow : that he might 
become, what nature never meant him to be 
— an artist. All along, when he has made 
any excuse, it has been 'art' But, more 
likely, he has not been asked for excuse, he 
has lived under the shelter of the ' genius ' 
superstition. He has worn the air of making 
great sacrifices for the goddess, and in these 
his intimates have felt a proud sense of 
awful participation, as of a family whom the 
gods love. They have never understood 
that art is a particular form of self-indul- 
gence, by no means confined to artists ; 
that it often becomes no less a vice than 



I02 PROSE FANCIES 

opium-eating, and that the same question 
has to be asked of both — whether the dreams 
are worth the cost. This might occasionally 
be asked of the world's famous : not only of 
those whose art has been the evilly exquisite 
outcome of spiritual disease, but even of the 
great sane successful reputations. 

There is, too, especially about the latter, 
perhaps, a touch of comic suggestiveness in 
the sublime preoccupation to which we owe 
their great legacies, that look of Atlas which 
is always pathetic, when it is not foolish, on 
the face of a mortal : the grand air of a 
Goethe, the colossal absorption of a Balzac. 
Their attitude offends one's sense of the 
relation of things, and we feel that, after all, 
we could have spared half their works for a 
larger share of that delicate instinct for pro- 
portion, which is one of the most precious 
attributes of what we call a gentleman. But 
the demi-god has always much of the 
nouveau riche about him, and a gentleman is, 
after all, an exquisite product. Indeed, the 
world has, one may think, quite enough 
genius to go on with. It could well do 
with a few more gentlemen. 



A BORROWED SOVEREIGN 

(to MR. AND MRS. WELCH) 

Jim lent me a sovereign. He was working 
hard to make his home, and was saving every 
penny. However, I took it, for I was really 
in sore straits. If you have ever known what 
it is absolutely to need a sovereign, when 
you have neither banking account nor em- 
ployment, and your evening clothes are no 
longer accessible for the last, you will be in 
a position to understand the transfiguring 
properties of one small piece of gold. You 
leave your friend's rooms a different man. 
Like the virtuous in the Buddhistic round, 
you go in a beggar and come out a prince. 
To vary Carlyle's phrase, you can pay for 
dinners, you can call hansoms, you can take 
stalls ; in fact, you are a prince — to the 
extent of a sovereign. 

And oh ! how wooingly does the world 

103 



I04 PROSE FANCIES 

seem to nestle round you — the same world 
that was so cold and haughty ten minutes 
ago. The world is a courtesan, and has 
heard you have found a sovereign. 

The gaslights seem beaming love at you. 
So near and bright are the streets, you want 
to stay out in them all night ; though you 
didn't relish the prospect last evening. O 
sweet, sweet, siren London, with your golden 
voice — I have a sovereign ! 

This, of course, was but the first rich im- 
pulse. The sovereign should really be kept 
for the lodgings. But the snug little oyster- 
shops about Booksellers' Row are so tempt- 
ing, and there is nothing like oysters to give 
one courage to open that giant oyster spoken 
of by Ancient Pistol. 

I went in. I assured my conscience that 
it should only be ' Anglo-Portuguese,' and 
that I would forego the roll and butter. 
But 'Anglos' are not nice, Dutch are in 
every way to be preferred ; and if you are 
paying eighteenpence you might as well pay 
three shillings, and what 's the use of drawing 
the line at a roll and butter? No! we will 
repent after the roll and butter. * Roll and 



A BORROWED SOVEREIGN 105 

butter ' shall be my Ebenezer. The * r's' have 
a notorious mnemonic quality. They will 
help me to remember. 

So I sat down, and, fondling my sovereign 
in my pocket, fell into a dream. When the 
oysters came I wished they had been 
'Anglos' after all, because my dream had 
grown beautiful and troublesome, and I had 
really forgotten the oysters altogether. 
However, I ate them mechanically, and 
ordering another half-dozen, so that the 
manager should not begrudge me my seat, 
I turned again to my dream. 

A young girl sat in a dainty room, writing 
at a quaint old escritoire, lit by candles in 
shining brass sconces. She had a sweet 
blonde face, but more character in it 
than usually falls to the lot of the English 
girl. There was experience in the sensitive 
refinement of her features, a silver touch of 
suffering: not wasting experience or bitter 
suffering, but just enough to refine — she had 
waited. But she had been bravely happy all 
the time. 

Pretty books filled a shelf above her 
escritoire, and between the candlesticks was 



io6 PROSE FANCIES 

a photograph in a filigree silver frame. To- 
wards this she looked every now and then, 
in the pauses of her writing, with a happy, 
trustful expression of quiet love. During one 
pause she noticed that her little clock pointed 
to 8.30. ' Jim will just be going on,' she said 
to herself. Yes, that photograph was * Jim.' 

A quaint little face it was, full of sweet 
wrinkles, and yet but a boy's face. The 
wrinkles, you could see, were but so many 
threads of gold which happy laughter had 
left there. Siss called him her Punchinello, 
likewise her poet, for Jim is a poet who 
makes his poetry of his own bright face 
and body, acts it night after night to an 
audience, and the people laugh and cry as 
he plays, for his face is like a bubbling 
spring, full of laughing eddies on the surface, 
but ever so deep with sweet freshness 
beneath — and some catch sight of the deeps. 
The world knows him as a comedian. Siss 
knows him as a poet, and because she knows 
what loving tender tears are in him as well as 
laughter, she calls him her Punchinello. 

This is what she was writing : ' How near 
our home seems now, Jimmie boy ! Every 



A BORROWED SOVEREIGN 107 

night as you go on — and you are just going 
on now — I feel our home draw nearer : and, 
do you know, all this week our star has 
seemed to grow brighter and brighter. Can 
you see it in London ? It comes out here 
about six o'clock — first very pale, like a 
dream, and then fuller and fuller and warmer 
and warmer. Sometimes I say that it is the 
sovereigns we are putting into the bank that 
make it so much brighter ; and I am sure it 
was brighter after that last ten pounds. . . . 
You are laughing at me, aren't you ? Never 
mind ; you can be just as silly. Dear, dear, 
funny little face ! ' 

I had reached just so far in my dream 
when the oysters came, and that is why I 
wished I had ordered * Anglos ' and no roll. 

When I looked again, Siss had stopped 
writing, and was sitting with her head in her 
hands dreaming. I looked into her eyes, felt 
ashamed for a moment, and then stepped 
into her dream. I felt I was not worthy to 
walk there, but I took off my hat and told 
myself that I was reverent. 

It was a pretty flat, full of dainty rooms, 
and I followed her from one to another, and 



io8 PROSE FANCIES 

one there was just like that in which I had 
seen her writing, with the old escritoire, and 
the books, and the burning candles, and the 
silver photograph shrine. She walked about 
very wistfully, and her eyes were full. So 
were mine, and I wanted to sob, but feared 
lest she should hear. Presently Jim joined 
her, and they walked together, and said to 
each other, * Think, this is our home at last ' — 
* Think, this is our home at last. O love, our 
home — together for evermore ! ' 

This they said many times, and at length 
they came to a room that had a door white 
as ivory, and I caught a breath of freshest 
flowers as they opened and passed in. 

Then I closed my eyes, and when I looked 
again I thought an angel stood on the 
threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in 
Victor Hugo — a happy angel with finger 
upon his lip. 

And when the dream had gone, and I was 
once more alone, I said 'Jim is working, Siss 
is waiting, and I — am eating borrowed 
oysters.' 

Then I took out the sovereign and looked 
at it, for it was now symbolic. Outside, above 



A BORROWED SOVEREIGN 109 

the street, a star was shining. I had filched 
a beam of Siss's star. Was it less bright to- 
night ? Had she missed this sovereign ? 

It had been symbolic before — a sovereign's- 
worth of the world, the flesh, and the devil ; 
now it was a sovereign's-worth of holy love 
and home. Every penny I spent of it 
dimmed that star, delayed that home. In 
my pocket it meant a sovereign's-worth more 
working and waiting. Pay it back again 
into that star, and it was a sovereign nearer 
home. Yes, it was a sovereign's-worth of 
that flat, of that escritoire, those books, those 
burning candles, that photograph, that ivory- 
white door, those sweet-smelling flowers, a 
sovereign's-worth of that angel, I was keep- 
ing in my pocket. 

Out on it ! God forgive me. I had not 
thought it meant that to borrow a sovereign 
from Jim, meant that to eat those borrowed 
oysters. Nevertheless, they had not been 
all an immoral indulgence. Even oysters 
may be the instruments of virtue in the 
hands of Providence. 

The shopman knew me, so I * confounded 
it ' and told him I had come out without my 



no PROSE FANCIES 

purse. It was all right. Pay next time. 
Jim's theatre was close by, it was but a 
stone's-throw to the stage-door. Easy to 
leave him a note. What will he think, I 
wonder, as he reads it, and the sovereign 
rolls out: 'Dear old man, forgive me — I 
forgot it was a sovereign's-worth of home.' 

Yet, after all, it was the oysters that did 
this thing. 



ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY 

(A FABLE FOR SOCIALISTS) 

Having occasion recently to re-arrange my 

books, they lay in bewildering jumbled heaps 

upon my study floor ; and, having in vain 

puzzled over this plan and that which should 

give the little collection a continuity such as 

it had never attained before, I at length gave 

it up in despair, and sat, with my head in my 

hands, hopeless. Presently I seemed to hear 

small voices talking in whispers, a curious 

papery tone, like the fluttering of leaves, and 

listening I heard distinctly these words : — 

' The great era of universal equality and 

redistribution has dawned at last. No one 

book shall any longer claim more shelf than 

another, no book shall be taller or thicker 

than another. The age of folios and quartos 

is past, and the Age of the Universal Octavo 

has dawned/ 

111 



112 PROSE FANCIES 

Looking up, I saw that the voice was that 
of a shabby, but perky, octavo, which I had 
forgotten I ever possessed, since the day when 
some mistaken charity had prompted me to 
rescue it from the threepenny box and give 
it a good home in a respectable family of 
books. Certainly, it had so far filled the 
humble position of a shelf-liner, and its 
accidental elevation into daylight on the 
top of a prostrate folio had evidently turned 
its head. It was now doing its best to 
disseminate socialistic principles among the 
set of scurvy octavos and duodecimos in its 
neighbourhood. 

* Why should we choke with dust in the 
dark there,' it continued, ' that these splendid 
creatures should glitter all day in the sun- 
shine, and get all the firelight of an evening ? 
We were born to be read as much as they, 
born to enjoy our share of the good things of 
this world as much as my Lord Folio, as 
much as any Honourable Quarto, or fashion- 
able Large Paper. My Brothers, the hour 
has come : will you strike now or never, exact 
your rights as free-born books, or will you go 
back to be shelf-liners as before ? ' 



ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY 113 

[Loud cries of ' No ! no ! we won't,' here 
encouraged the speaker.] 

'Strike now, and the book unborn shall 
bless you. Miss this golden opportunity, and 
the cause we serve will be delayed another 
hundred editions.' 

At this point a great folio that had for 
some time been leaning threateningly, like 
a slab at Stonehenge, above the speajcer, 
suddenly fell and silenced him ; but he had 
not spoken in vain, and from various sets of 
books about the room I heard the voices of 
excited agitators taking up his words. Then 
an idea struck me. I was, as I told you, 
heartily sick of my task of arrangement. 
Here seemed an opportunity. 

' Look here,' I said, * you shall have it all 
to yourselves. I resign, I abdicate. You 
shall arrange yourselves as you please, but 
be quick about it, and let there be •as little 
bloodshed as possible.' 

With that there arose such a hubbub as 
was never before heard in a quiet book-room, 
not even during that famous battle of the St. 
James's Library in 1697 ; and conspicuous 
among the noises was a strange crowing 
H 



114 PROSE FANCIES 

sound as of young cocks, which I was at a 
loss to understand, till I bethought me how 
Mentzelius, long ago, sitting in the quiet of 
his library, had heard the bookworm 'crow 
like a cock unto his mate.' On looking I saw 
that the insurgents had indeed pressed into 
their service a certain politic body of book- 
worms as joyous heralds, whom I had never 
suspected of inhabiting my books at all — 
though, indeed, such hidden creatures do crawl 
out of their corners in times of upheaval. 

It was long before I could disentangle indi- 
vidual voices from the wild chaos of strident 
theories that surrounded me. But at last 
there was silence, as one bilious-looking vellum 
book, old enough to have known better, had 
evidently caught the ear of the assembled 
multitudes ; and then I understood that 
the movement had already found its Robes- 
pierre. It was clear from his words that the 
universal gospel of equality, so beautifully 
expatiated upon before the revolution, had 
had reference only to those who were already 
on an equality of that low estate which fears 
no fall. The only equality now offered to 
books above the rank of octavo was that of 



ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY 115 

death, which, philosophers have long assured 
us, makes all men equal, by a short and 
simple method. There was but one other 
way — that the quartos should consent to be 
cut in two, and the folios quartered ; but that, 
alas ! meant death no less, for that which 
alone is of worth in both books and men, the 
soul, would be no more. So, as it seemed 
they must die either way, all the condemned 
chose death before dishonour. Several dis- 
tinguished folios who, in a quixotism of 
heart, had flirted with the socialistic leaders 
when their schemes were but propaganda, 
and equality had not yet been so rigor- 
ously defined, now bitterly repented their 
folly, and did their best in heading a rally 
against their foes. That, however, was 
soon quelled, and but hastened their 
doom. 

* To the guillotine with them ! ' cried the 
bilious little octavo, and then I saw that my 
tobacco-cutter had been extemporised into 
the deadly engine. 

But, hereupon, a voice of humour found 
hearing, that of a stout 32mo, evidently a 
philosopher. 



ii6 PROSE FANCIES 

* Why shed blood ? ' he said, ' I have a 
better plan. Stature is no mark of superi- 
ority, but usually the reverse. The mind 's 
the standard of the man. In the world of 
men the tallest and handsomest are made 
into servants, and called flunkies, and these 
wait upon the small men, who have all the 
money, which among men corresponds to 
brains among books. Why shouldn't we 
take a hint from this custom, and turn 
these tall gaudy gentlemen into our ser- 
vants, for which all their gilt and fine 
clothes have already provided them with 
livery ? Ho ! Sirrah Folio, come and turn 
my page ! ' 

But this Lord Folio haughtily refused to 
do, and, consequently, being too stout to turn 
his own pages, the little 32mo could say no 
more. His proposal, though it tickled a few, 
found no great favour. It was generally 
agreed that humour had no place in the 
discussion of a serious question. Another 
speaker advocated the retention of the con- 
demned as ornaments of the state, but he 
was very speedily overruled. Was not that 
the shallow excuse by which they had hung 



ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY ir^ 

on for ever so long? No, that was quite 
worn out. 

The main question was further obstructed 
by many outbursts of individualism. Certain 
self-contained books wished to be left to 
themselves, and have no part in the social 
scheme, unless in the event of a return to 
monarchy, when, they intimated, they might 
be eligible for election. This, one could see, 
was the secret hope of all the speakers ; and 
you would have laughed could you have 
heard what inflated opinions some of them 
had of their own importance — especially two 
or three of the minor poets. Then, again, 
many sentimental demands, quite unforeseen, 
added to the general anarchy. Collected 
editions, which had long groaned in the bond- 
age of an arbitrary relationship, saw an oppor- 
tunity in the general overturn to break away 
from their sets and join their natural fellows. 
Sex was naturally the most unruly element 
of all. Volumes that had waited edition after 
edition for each other, yearning across the 
shelves, felt their time had come at last, and 
leapt into each other's arms. It was with no 
avail that a distress minute was passed by The 



ii8 PROSE FANCIES 

Hundred Thousand Committee (a somewhat 
unworkable body) that henceforth sex was 
to be a function exercised absolutely for the 
good of the state : tattered poets were to be 
seen wildly proclaiming a different doctrine. 

Such eccentric attachments as a volume of 
The Essays of Elia for Margaret, Duchess 
of Newcastle, were especially troublesome ; 
while the explosion caused by the accidental 
contact of that same unruly Elia with a 
modern reprint of The A natoiny of Melan- 
choly, which (he said) he never could tolerate, 
proved the last straw to the Committee of 
the Hundred Thousand, who immediately 
resigned their offices in anger and despair. 
Thereupon, tenfold chaos once more return- 
ing, I thought it time to interfere. The Doc- 
trine of Equality was evidently a failure — 
among books, at any rate. So I savagely 
fell to, and threw the books back again into 
their immemorial places, and the cause of 
freedom in ' The City of Books ' sleeps for 
another hundred editions. 

Only I placed Elia next to the Duchess, 
because he was a human fellow and had no 
theories. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
'LIMITED EDITIONS- 
WHY do the heathen so furiously rage 
against limited issues, large - papers, first 
editions, and the rest ? For there is certainly 
more to be said for than against them. 
Broadly speaking, all such ' fads ' are worthy 
of being encouraged, because they mamtam, 
in some measure, the expiring dignity of 
letters, the mystery of books. Day by day 
the wonderfulness of life is becoming lost to 
us. The sanctities of religion are defiled, the 
' fairy tales ' of science have become common- 
places. Christian mysteries are debased in 
the streets to the sound of drum and trumpet, 
and the sensitive ear of the telephone is but 
a servile drudge 'twixt speculative bacon 
merchants. And Books !-those miraculous 
memories of high thoughts and golden 
moods; those magical shells tremulous with 



I20 PROSE FANCIES 

the secrets of the ocean of life ; those love- 
letters that pass from hand to hand of a 
thousand lovers that never meet ; those 
honeycombs of dreams ; those orchards of 
knowledge ; those still-beating hearts of the 
noble dead ; those mysterious signals that 
beckon along the darksome pathways of the 
past ; voices through which the myriad 
lispings of the earth find perfect speech ; 
oracles through which its mysteries call like 
voices in moonlit woods ; prisms of beauty ; 
urns stored with all the sweets of all the 
summers of time ; immortal nightingales that 
sing for ever to the rose of life : Books, Bibles 
— ah me ! what have ye become to-day ! 

What, indeed, has become of that mystery 
of the Printed Word, of which Carlyle so 
movingly wrote? It has gone, it is to be 
feared, with those Memnonian mornings we 
sleep through with so determined snore, those 
ancient mysteries of night we forget beneath 
the mimic firmament of the music-hall. 

Only in the lamplit closet of the bookman, 
the fanatic of first and fine editions, is it 
remembered and revered. To him alone of 
an Americanised, ' pirated-edition ' reading 



'LIMITED EDITIONS' 121 

world, the book remains the sacred thing it 
is. Therefore, he would not have it degraded 
by, so to say, an indiscriminate breeding, 
such as has also made the children of men 
cheap and vulgar to each other. We pity 
the desert rose that is born to unappreciated 
beauty, the unset gem that glitters on no 
woman's hand ; but what of the book that 
eats its heart out in the threepenny box, the 
remainders that are sold ignominiously in 
job lots by ignorant auctioneers ? Have we 
no feeling for them ? 

Over-production, in both men and shirts, is 
the evil of the day. The world has neither 
enough food, nor enough love, for the young 
that are born into it. We have more mouths 
than we can fill, and more books than we can 
buy. Well, the publisher and collector of 
limited editions aim, in their small corner, to 
set a limit to this careless procreation. They 
are literary Malthusians. The ideal world 
would be that in which there should be at 
least one lover for each woman. In the 
higher life of books the ideal is similar. No 
book should be brought into the world, 
which is not sure of love and lodging on some 



122 PROSE FANCIES 

comfortable shelf. If writers and publishers 
only gave a thought to what they are doing, 
when they generate such large families of 
books, careless as the salmon with its million 
young, we should have no such sad alms- 
houses of learning as Booksellers' Row, no 
such melancholy distress-sales of noble 
authors as remainder auctions. A good book 
is beyond price ; and it is far easier to under 
than over sell it The words of the modern 
minor poet are as rubies, and what if his sets 
bring a hundred guineas? — it is more as it 
should be, than that any sacrilegious hand 
should fumble them for threepence. It 
recalls that golden age of which Mr. Dobson 
has sung, when — 



* ... a book was still a Book, 
Where a wistful man might look, 
Finding something through the whole 
Beating — like a human soul ' ; 



days when for one small gilded manuscript 
men would willingly exchange broad manors, 
with pasture lands, chases, and blowing 
woodlands ; days when kings would send 
anxious embassies across the sea, burdened 



^LIMITED EDITIONS' 123 

with rich gifts to abbot and prior, if haply- 
gold might purchase a single poet's book. 

But, says the scoffer, these limited editions 
and so forth foster the vile passions of 
competition. Well, and if they do? Is it 
not meet that men should strive together for 
such possessions? We compete for the 
allotments of shares in American-meat com- 
panies, we outbid each other for tickets * to 
view the Royal procession,' we buffet at the 
gate of the football field, and enter into many 
another of the ignoble rivalries of peace ; and 
are not books worth a scrimmage? — books 
that are all those wonderful things so poeti- 
cally set forth in a preceding paragraph ! 
Lightly earned, lightly spurned, is the sense, 
if not the exact phrasing, of an old proverb. 
There is no telling how we should value 
many of our possessions if they were more 
arduously come by : our relatives, our 
husbands and wives, our presentation poetry 
from the unpoetical, our invitation-cards to 
one-man shows in Bond Street, the auto- 
photographs of great actors, the flatteries of 
the unimportant, the attentions of the em- 
barrassing : how might we not value all such 



124 PROSE FANCIES 

treasures, if they were, so to say, restricted to 
a limited issue, and guaranteed ' not to be 
reprinted' — 'plates destroyed and type dis- 
tributed.' 

Indeed, all nature is on the side of limited 
editions. Make a thing cheap, she cries from 
every spring hedgerow, and no one values 
it. When do we find the hawthorn, with 
its breath sweet as a milch-cow's ; or the 
wild rose, with its exquisite attar and its 
petals of hollowed pearl — when do we find 
these decking the tables of the great ? or the 
purple bilberry, or the boot-bright blackberry 
in the entremets thereof? Think what that 
' common dog-rose ' would bring in a limited 
edition ! And new milk from the cow, or 
water from the well ! Where would cham- 
pagne be if those intoxicants were restricted 
by expensive licence, and sold in gilded 
bottles? What would you not pay for a 
ticket to see the moon rise, if nature had not 
improvidently made it a free entertainment ; 
and who could afford to buy a seat at Covent 
Garden if Sir Augustus Harris should 
suddenly become sole impresario of the 
nightingale ? 



'LIMITED EDITIONS' 125 

Yes, ' from scarped cliff and quarried 
stone/ Nature cries, ' Limit the Edition ! 
Distribute the type ! ' — though in her capa- 
city as the great publisher, she has been all 
too prodigal of her issues, and ruinously 
guilty of innumerable remainders. In fact, it 
is by her warning rather than by her example 
that we must be guided in this matter. Let 
us not vulgarise our books, as she has done 
her stars and flowers. Let us, if need be, 
make our editions smaller and smaller, our 
prices increasingly * prohibitive,' rather than 
that we should forget the wonder and beauty 
of printed dream and thought, and treat our 
books as somewhat less valuable than way- 
side weeds. 



A PLEA FOR THE OLD 
PLAYGOER 

He *S a nuisance, of course. But to see only 
that side of him is to think, as the shepherd 
boy piped, ' as though ' you will ' never grow 
old.' Does he never appeal to you with any 
more human significance, a significance tear- 
ful and uncomfortably symbolic? Or are 
you so entirely that tailor's fraction of man- 
hood, the fin de Steele type, that your ninth 
part does not include a heart and the 
lachrymal gland ? 

You suspect him at once as you squeeze 
past his legs to your stall, for he cannot quite 
conceal the hissing twinge of gout ; and you 
are hardly seated ere you are quite sure that 
a long night of living for others is before you. 

' You hardly would think it, perhaps,' he 
begins, * but I saw Charles Young play the 
part — yes, in 1824.' 

1?,6 



THE OLD PLAYGOER 127 

If you are young and innocent, you think 
— * What an interesting old gentleman ! ' and 
you have vague ideas of pumping him for 
reminiscences to turn into copy. Poor 
boy, you soon find that there is no need 
of pumping on your part. He is entirely 
self-acting, and the wells of his autobio- 
graphy are as deep as the foundations of 
the world. 

If you are more experienced, you make a 
quick frantic effort to escape ; you try to nip 
the bud of his talk with a frosty ' indeed ! ' 
and edge away, calling upon your programme 
to cover you. You never so much as turn 
the sixteenth part of an eye in his direction, 
for even as the oyster-man, should the poor 
mollusc heave the faintest sigh, is inside with 
his knife in the twinkling of a star ; even as 
a beetle has but to think of moving its tiniest 
leg for the bird to swoop upon him, — even so 
will the least muscular interest in your neigh- 
bour give you bound hand and foot into his 
power. 

But really and truly escape is hopeless. 
You are beyond the reach of any salvage 
agency whatsoever. Better make up your 



128 PROSE FANCIES 

mind to be absolutely rude or absolutely- 
kind : and the man who can find in his heart 
to be the former must have meeting eye- 
brows, and will sooner or later be found 
canonised in wax at Madame Tussaud's. To 
be the latter, however, is by no means easy. 
It is one of the most poignant forms of self- 
sacrifice attained by the race. In that, at 
least, you have some wintry consolation ; and 
the imaginative vignette of yourself wearing 
the martyr's crown is a pretty piece of sacred 
art. 

If you wished to make a bag of old play- 
goers, or meditated a sort of Bartholomew's 
Eve, a revival of Hamlet would, of course, 
be the occasion you would select for your 
purpose : for the old playgoer, so to speak, 
collects Hamlets. At a first night of Hamlet 
every sixth stall-holder is a Dr. Doran up to 
date, his mind a portfolio of old prints. 

That is why a perambulation of the stalls 
is as perilous as to pick one's way through 
hot ploughshares. You can hardly hope 
always to pass through unscathed. You 
are as sure some night to find yourself 
seated beside him, as you will some 



THE OLD PLAYGOER 129 
day be called to serve on the jury. And 



then- 



O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, 
Art more engaged ! ' 



However, 'sudden the worst turns best to 
the brave,' and * there is much music ' in this 
old fellow if only you have the humanity to 
listen. 

To begin with, he has probably a dis- 
tinguished face, with a bunch of vigorous 
curly hair, white as hawthorn. He has a 
manner, too. Suppose you try and enter 
into his soul for a moment. It does us good 
to get outside ourselves for a while, and 
this old man's soul is a palace of memory. 
Those lines that, maybe, have been familiar 
to you for sixteen years, have been familiar to 
him for sixty. That is why he knows them 
off so well, why he repeats them under his 
breath — Look at his face ! — like a Methodist 
praying, anticipating the actor in all the fine 
speeches. Do look at his face ! How it 
shines, as the golden passages come treading 
along. How his head moves in an ecstasy 
of remembrance, in which there is a whole 
world of tears. How he half turns to you 



I30 PROSE FANCIES 

with a wistful appeal to feel what he is 
feeling : an appeal that might kindle a clod. 
It is the old wine laughing to itself within 
the old bottle. 

And, one thing you will notice, it is the 
poetry that moves him : the great metaphor, 
the sonorous cadence, the honeysuckle 
fancy. He belongs to an age that had an 
instinct for beauty, and loved style — an age 
that, in the words of a modern wit, had not 
grown all nose with intellect, an age that 
went to the theatre to dream, not to dissect. 

For you there may be here and there 
a flower of remembrance stuck within the 
leaves of the play, but for him it is stained 
through with the sweets of sixty springs. 
His youth lies buried within it like a 
thousand violets. 

Practically he is Death at the play. To 
you there is but one ghost in Hamlet^ to him 
there are fifty, and they all dance like 
shadows behind * the new Hamlet,' and even 
sit about the stalls. 

If your love be with you, forbear to press 
her hand in the love-scenes, or, at least, don't 
let the old man see you : because he used to 



THE OLD PLAYGOER 131 

punctuate those very passages he is mutter- 
ing, in just the same way — sixty years ago, 
when she whose angel face he will kiss no 
more, unless it be in the heavenly fields, sat 
like a flower at his side. Poor old fellow, 
can you be selfish to him ? Can you say, 

* These tedious old fools ! ' Fool thyself, this 
night shall thy youth be required of thee. 

You might think of this next time you 
drop across the old playgoer. It was natural 
in Hamlet to swear at Polonius — who, you 
will remember, was an old playgoer himself 
— but, being a gentleman, it was natural in 
him, too, to recall the first player with, 

* Follow that lord ; but look you mock him 
not!' 



THE MEASURE OF A MAN 

I SOMETIMES grow melancholy with the 
thought that, though I wear trousers and 
shave once a day, I am not, properly speak- 
ing, a Man. Surely it is from no failure of 
goodwill, no lack of prayerful striving towards 
that noble estate : for if there is one spec- 
tacle in this moving phantasmagoria of life 
that I love to carry within my eye, it is the 
figure of a true man. The mere idea of a 
true man stirs one's heart like a trumpet. 
Therefore, this doubt I am confiding is all 
the more dreary. Naturally, I feel it most 
keenly in the company of my fellows, each 
one of whom seems to carry the victorious 
badge of manhood, as though to cry shame 
upon me. They make me shrink into my- 
self, make me feel that I am but an impostor 
in their midst. Indeed, in that sensitiveness 
of mine you have the starting-point of my 

132 



THE MEASURE OF A MAN 133 

unmanliness. Look at that noble fellow- 
there. He is six-foot odd in his stockings, 
straight, stalwart, and confident. His face is 
broad and strong, his close-cropped head is 
firm and proud on his shoulders — firm and 
proud as a young bull's. It is a head made, 
indeed, rather to butt than to think with ; it 
is visited with no effeminacy of thought or 
dream. It has another striking quality: 
it is hardly distinguishable from any other 
head in the room — for I am in an assemblage 
of true men all, a glorious herd of young 
John Bulls. All have the same strong 
jaws, the same powerful low foreheads. 
Noble fellows ! Any one of them could send 
me to eternity with the wind of his fist. 

And, most of all, is their manhood brought 
home to me, with a sickening sense of inferi- 
ority, in their voices. What a leonine 
authority in the roar of their opinions ! 
Their words strike the air firm as the tread 
of lions. They are not teased with fine 
distinctions, possibilities of misconception, 
or the perils of afterthought. Their talk is 
of the absolute, their opinions wear the 
primary colours, and dream not of ' art 



134 PROSE FANCIES 

shades.' Never have they been wrong in 
their lives, never shall they be wrong in the 
time to come. Never have they been known 
to conjecture that another may, after all, be 
wiser than they, handsomer, stronger, or 
more fortunate. They would kill a man 
rather than admit a mistake. Noble fellows ! 
And I ? Do you wonder that I blush in my 
corner as I gaze upon them, strive to smooth 
my hair into the appearance of a manly 
flatness, strive to set my face hard and feign 
it knowing, strive to elevate my voice to the 
dogmatic note, strive to cast out from my 
mind all those evil spirits of proportion ? 

Can it be possible that any one of my 
readers has ever been in a like case? Is 
there hope for us, my brother ? You have, I 
perceive, a fine, expressive, sensitive counten- 
ance. That is, indeed, against you in this 
race for manhood. It is true that Apollo 
passed for a man — but that was long ago, 
and not in Britain. You have a pleasant, 
sympathetic voice. An excellent thing in 
woman. But you, my friend, — break it, I 
beseech you. Coarsen it with raw spirits 
and rawer opinions ; and set that face of 



THE MEASURE OF A MAN 135 

thine with hog's bristles, plant a shoe-brush 
on thy upper lip, and send thy head to the 
turner of billiard balls. Else come not nigh 
me, for, 'fore Heaven, I love a man ! 

Sometimes, however, I am inclined to a 
more comfortable consideration of this great 
question — for it is one of my weaknesses to 
be positive on few matters. But to-day I 
taunted my soul with its unmanliness till it 
rose in rebellion against me. ' Poor-spirited 
creature,' I said, * where is thy valour ? 
When a fool has struck thee I have seen thee 
pass on without a word, not so much as a 
momentary knitting of thy fist. When 
ignorance has waxed proud, and put thee 
to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered 
never a word. It must needs be thou 
art pigeon-livered and lack gall ! There 
is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the 
braggadocio of a true swashbuckler manhood. 
Out on thee ! ' 

And my soul took the blows in patience. 

* Hast thou any courage hid in any crevice 
of thee?' I continued my taunt. And 
suddenly my soul answered with a firm quiet 
voice : ' Try me ! ' 



136 PROSE FANCIES 

Then said I, ' Coward as thou art, fearful 
of thy precious skin, darest thou strike a 
blow for the weak against his oppressor, 
darest thou meet the strong tyrant in the 
way?' 

And thereon I was startled, for my soul 
suddenly sprang up within me, and, lo ! it 
neighed like a war-horse for the battle. 

' Ah ! ' I continued, * but couldst thou fight 
against the enemy of thy land ? Surely thy 
valour would melt at the clash of swords and 
the voice of the drum ? ' 

And the answer of my soul was like the 
march of armed men. 

Then said I softly, for i was touched by 
this unwonted valour of my soul, * Soul ! 
wouldst thou die for thy friend ? ' 

And the voice of my soul came sweet as 
the sound of bells at evening. It seemed, 
indeed, as though it could dream of naught 
sweeter than to die for one's friend. 

This colloquy of inner and outer set me 
further reflecting. Can it be that this man- 
hood is, after all, rather a quality of the 
spirit than of the body ; that it is to be 
sought rather in the stout heart than in the 



THE MEASURE OF A MAN 137 

strong arm ; that big words and ready blows 
may, like a display of bunting, betoken no 
true loyalty, and be but the gaudy sign to a 
sorry inn? Dr. Watts, it may be remem- 
bered, declared the mind to be the standard 
of the man. As he was the author of a book 
on 'The Human Mind/ envious persons 
may meanly conceive that his statement was 
but a subtly-disguised advertisement of his 
literary wares. 

* Were I so tall to reach the Pole, 
Or grasp the ocean in my span, 
I must be measured by my soul : 
The mind 's the standard of the man.' 

The fact of Dr. Watts being also a man of 
low stature does not affect the truth or un- 
truth of this fine verse, which may serve to 
comfort many. One may assume that it was 
Jack, and not the giant, whom we would 
need to describe as the true man of the two ; 
and one seems to have heard of some ' fine,* 
* manly' fellows, darlings of the football 
field and the American bar, whose actions 
somehow have not altogether justified those 
epithets, or, at any rate, certain readings of 
them. Theirs is a manhood, one fancies. 



138 PROSE FANCIES 

that is given to shine more at race-meetings 
and in hotel parlours than at home — revealed 
to the bar-maid, and strangely hidden from 
the wife, who, indeed, has less opportunities 
for perceiving it. 

This kind of manhood is, perhaps, rather a 
fashion than a personal quality : a way of 
carrying the stick, of wearing, or not wear- 
ing, the hair ; it resides in the twirl of the 
moustache, or the cut of the trouser ; you 
must seek it in the quality of the boot and 
the shape of the hat rather than in the 
actions of the wearer. 

Take that matter of the hair. When next 
the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your 
passing that ' it 's no wonder the barbers all 
'list for soldiers,' or some puny idiot at your 
club — a lilliputian model of popular 'man- 
hood' — sniggers to his friend behind his 
coffee as you come in : call to mind pictures 
of certain brave ' tailed men ' of old, at the 
winking of whose eyelid your tiny club 'man ' 
would have expired on the instant. Threaten 
him with a Viking. Show him in a vision a 
band of blue-eyed pirates, with their wild 
hair flying in the breeze, as they sternly 



THE MEASURE OF A MAN 139 
hasten across the Northern Sea. Summon 
Godiva's lord, ' his beard a yard before him, 
and his hair a yard behind.' Call up the 
brave picture of Rupert's love-locked Cava- 
liers, as their glittering column hurls like a 
bolt of heaven to the charge, or Nelson's 
pig-tailed sailors in Trafalgar's Bay. But, 
before you have gone half-way through 
your panorama, that club-mannikin will 
have hastily departed, leaving his coffee 
half-drunk, and you shall find him airing 
his manhood in the security of the billiard- 
room. 

Yes, for us who are denied the admiration 
of the billiard-marker ; denied the devotion 
of the bar-maid (with charming paradox so- 
called) ; for us who make poor braggarts, 
and often prefer to surrender rather than to 
elbow for our rights ; for us who deliver our 
opinions with mean-spirited diffidence, and 
are men of quiet voices and ways : for us 
there is hope. It may be that to love one's 
neighbour is also a part of manhood, to 
suffer quietly for another as true a piece of 
bravery as to fell him for a careless word ; 
it may be that purity, constancy, and rever- 



140 PROSE FANCIES 

ence are as sure criteria of manhood as 
their opposites. It may be, I say; but be 
certain that a strong beard, a harsh voice, 
and a bull -dog physiognomy are surer 
stilL 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF 
WOMAN 

Have you ever remarked as a curious thing 
that, whereas every day we hear women sigh- 
ing because they have not been born men, 
you never hear a sigh blowing in the other 
direction ? I only know one man who had 
the courage to say that he would not mind 
exchanging into the female infantry, and it 
may have been affectation on his part. At 
any rate, he blushed deeply at the avowal, 
and his friends look askance at him ever 
since. Of course, the obvious answer of the 
self-satisfied male is that he is the lord of 
creation, that his is the better part which 
shall not be taken from him. Yet this does 
not prevent his telling his wife sometimes, 
when oppressed with the cares of this world 
and the deceitfulness of riches, that ' it is 
nice to be her. Nothing to worry her all 

141 



142 PROSE FANCIES 

day long. No responsibility.' For in his 
primitive vision of female existence, his 
wife languidly presides for ever at an 
eternal five-o'clock tea. And it is not in 
the province of this article to turn to him 
the seamy side of that charming picture. 
Rather is it our mission to convince him of 
the substantial truth of his intuition. He is 
quite right. It is 'nice to be her.' And if 
men had a little more common-sense in their 
consequential skulls, instead of striving to 
resist the woman's invasion of their imme- 
morial responsibilities and worries, they would 
joyfully abdicate them — and skip home to 
Nirvana and afternoon tea. 

Foolish women ! To want of your own 
free will to put yourselves in painful harness ; 
to take the bit of servitude between your 
rose-leaf lips ; to fight day-long in the 
reeking arena of bacon merchants ; to settle 
accounts instead of merely incurring them ; 
to be confined in Stygian city-blocks instead 
of silken bedchambers ; to rise with the 
sparrow and leave by the early morning 
train. What fatuity ! Some day, when 
woman has had her way and man has ceased 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN 143 

to have his will, she will see of the travail 
of her soul and be bitterly dissatisfied ; for, 
unless man is a greater fool than he looks, 
she shall demand back her petticoats in 
vain. 

For what is the lot of woman ? The first 
superficial fact about a woman is, of course, 
her beauty. Secondly, as the leaves about a 
rose, comes her dress. To be beautiful and 
to wear pretty things — these are two of the 
obvious privileges of woman. To be a 
living rose, with bosom of gold and petals of 
lace, a rose each passer-by longs to pluck 
from its husband-stem, but dare not for fear 
of the husband-thorns. To be privileged to 
play Narcissus all day long with your mirror, 
to love yourself so much that you kiss the 
cold reflection, yet fear not to drown. To 
reveal yourself to yourself in a thousand 
lovely poses, and bird-like poises of the head. 
To kneel to yourself in adoration, to laugh 
and nod and beckon to yourself with your 
own smiles and dimples, to yearn in hopeless 
passion for your own loveliness. To finger 
silken garments, linings to the casket of your 
beauty, never seen of men, to draw on stiff 



144 PROSE FANCIES 

embroidered gowns, to deck your hands with 
glittering jewels, and your wrists with bands 
of gold — and then to sail forth from your 
boudoir like the moon from a cloud, regally 
confident of public worship ; to be at once 
poet and poem, painter and painted : does 
not this belong to the lot of woman ? 

But it was of nobler privileges than these 
that the candidate for womanhood of whom 
I have spoken was thinking. It is fit that 
we skim the surface before we dive into the 
deeps — especially so attractive a surface as 
woman's. He was, doubtless, thinking less 
of woman as a home comfort or a beauty, 
and much more of her as she once used to be 
among our far-off sires, Sibyl and Priestess. 
Is it but an insular fancy to suppose that 
Englishmen, beyond any other race, still 
retain the most living faith in the sanctity of 
womanhood ? and, if so, can it be doubted 
that it is an inheritance from those wild 
child-hearted Vikings, who were first among 
the peoples of Europe to conceive woman as 
the chosen vessel of the divine ? And how 
wittily true, by the way, how slily significant, 
was both the Norse and the Greek concep- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN 145 

tion of the ruling destinies of man, the Norns 
and the Fates, as women ! 

To speak with authority, one should, 
doubtless, first sprout petticoats ; and, mean- 
while, one must rest content with asking 
the intelligent women of our acquaintance 
— whether man inspires them with anything 
like the feelings of reverential adoration, 
the sense of a being holy and supernal, 
with which woman undoubtedly inspires 
man. He is, of course, their god, but a god 
of the Greek pattern, with no little of the 
familiarising alloy of earth in his composition. 
He is strong, and swift, and splendid — but 
seems he holy ? Is he angel as well as god ? 
Does the dream of him rise silvery in the 
imagination of woman ? Is he a star to lift 
her up to heaven with pure importunate beam? 
I seem to hear the nightingale-laughter of 
women for answer. Man neither is, nor 
would they have him, any of these things. 

But though some men, by a fortunate admix- 
ture of woman silver in their masculine clay, 
may be even these, there is one sacred thing 
no man can ever be, a privilege by which 
nature would seem to have put beyond doubt 
K 



146 PROSE FANCIES 

the divinity of woman : a mother. It is true 
that it is within his reach to be a father ; but 
what is ' paternity ' compared with mother- 
hood ? The very word wears a droll face, as 
though accustomed to banter. Let us venture 
on the bull : that, though it be possible for 
most men to be fathers, no man can ever be 
a mother. Maybe a recondite intention of 
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception 
was the accentuation of the fact that man's 
share in the sacred mystery of birth is so 
small and woman's so great, that the birth of 
a child is truly a mysterious traffic between 
divine powers of nature and her miraculous 
womb — mystic visitations of radiant forces 
hidden eternally from the knowledge of man. 
We stand in wonder before the magical 
germinating properties of a clod of earth. A 
grass-seed and a thimbleful of soil set all the 
sciences at nought. But if such is the wonder 
of the mere spectator, how strange to be the 
very vessel of the mystery, to know it moving 
through its mystic stations within our very 
bodies, to feel the tender shoots of the young 
life striking out blade after blade, already 
living and wonderful, though as yet unsus- 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF WOMAN 147 

pected of other eyes ; to know the under- 
ground inarticulate spring, sweeter far than 
spring of bird and blossom, while as yet all 
seems barren winter in the upper air ; to hear 
already the pathetic pleadings of the young 
life, and to send back soothing answer along 
the hidden channels of tender tremulous affini- 
ties ; to lie still in the night and see through 
the darkness the little white soul shining 
softly in its birth-sleep, slowly filling with life 
as a moon with silver — it was a woman and 
not a man that God chose for this blessedness. 



VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN 

The strength of the old-fashioned virago 
was in her muscles. That of the new- 
fangled modern development is in her 

* reason ' — a very different thing indeed from 

* woman's reasons.' As the former knocked 
you down with her fist, the latter fells you 
with her brain. In her has definitely 
commenced that evolutionary process which, 
according to the enchanting dream of a recent 
scientist, is to make the 'homo' a creature 
whose legs are- of no account, poor shrivelled 
vestiges of once noble calves and thighs ; 
and whose entire significance will be a 
noseless, hairless head, in shape and size 
like an idiot's, which the scientist, gloating 
over the ugly duckling of his distorted 
imagination, describes as a ' beautiful, glitter- 
ing, hairless dome ! ' A sad period one 
fears for Gaiety burlesque. In that day 

148 



VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN 149 
a beautifully shaped leg and a fine head 
of hair will be rather a disgrace than a 
distinction. They will be survivals of a 
barbarous age. Indeed that they are al- 
ready so regarded, there can be no doubt, 
by the more * advanced ' representatives of 
the female sex. 

There is one radical difference between 
the old and the new virago : the old gloried 
in the fact that she was a woman, because 
thus her sex triumphed over that male whom 
she despised, like her modern sister, in 
proportion as she resembled him. The 
new virago, however, hates above all things 
to be reminded of her womanhood, which 
she is constantly engaged in repressing 
with Chinese ferocity. Not, as we have 
hinted, that she thinks any better of man. 
Though she dresses as like him as possible, 
she is very angry if you suggest that she at 
all envies him his birthright. And the 
humour of the situation, the hopeless 
dilemma in which she thus places herself — 
if it be right to apply the feminine gender ! 
— never occurs to one whose sense of 
humour has long been atrophied, perhaps 



ISO PROSE FANCIES 

at Girton, or by a course of sterilising Ex- 
tension lectures. 

Obviously, there is but one course open 
for the advanced 'woman' in this dilemma 
— to evolve a third sex ; and this she is 
doing her best to achieve, with, I am 
bound to admit, remarkably speedy success. 
The result up to date is the Virago of the 
Brain, or the Female Frankenstein. The 
patentees of this fearsome tertium quid hope 
to present it to their patrons, within a very 
few years, in a form entirely devoid of certain 
physiological defects, with which the cussed- 
ness of human structure still uselessly 
burdens the Virago. As it is, of course, it 
is by no means uncommon for the virago to 
be born without that sentimental organ, the 
heart ; and it can, therefore, only be a 
matter of time before she is rid of what the 
present writer has been criticised for call- 
ing ' her miraculous womb.' Doubtless, the 
patentees will then turn their attention to 
Sir Thomas Browne's suggested method for 
the propagation of the race after the reason- 
able, civilised, and advanced manner of trees. 

But I am warned that I commit impro- 



VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN 151 

priety even in naming such matters. They 
are 'sacred,' — which means that we ought to be 
ashamed to mention them, however reverent 
our intention. Motherhood, it would appear, 
is not, as one had regarded it, a sanctifying 
privilege, but a shameful disability, of which 
not the Immaculate Conception, but the 
ignoble service for the ' purification ' of 
women, is the significant symbol. It 
behoves not only the unmarried, but the 
married mothers, so to speak, to wear far- 
thingales upon the subject, and pretend, 
with as grave a face as possible, that babies 
are really found under cabbages, or sent 
parcel post, on application, by her Majesty 
the Queen. 

How long are we to retain the pernicious 
fallacy that sacredness is a quality inhere 
ing not in the sacred object itself, but in the 
superstitious 'decencies' that swaddle it, or 
that we best reverence such sacred object by 
a prurient prudish conspiracy of silence 
concerning it ? 

Then there is, it would also appear, a 
particular indignity, from the new virago*s 
point of view, in the assumption that a 



152 PROSE FANCIES 

woman's beauty is one of her great missions, 
or the supposition that she takes any such 
pride in it herself as man has from time 
immemorial supposed. No sensible woman, 
we have been indignantly assured, ever 
plays at Narcissus with her mirror. That 
all women find such pleasure in their reflec- 
tions no one would think of saying. How 
could they, poor things ? One is quite 
ready to admit that probably our virago 
looks in her glass as seldom as possible. 
But all sensible women that are beautiful as 
well should take joy in their own charms, if 
they have any feelings of gratitude towards 
the supernal powers which might have made 
them — well, more advanced than beautiful, 
and given them a head full of cheap philo- 
sophy instead of a transfiguring head of 
hair. 

No one wants a woman to be silly and 
vain about her beauty. But vanity and 
conceit are qualities that exist in people 
quite independently of their gifts and 
graces. The ugly and stupid are perhaps 
more often conceited than the beautiful or 
the clever, — vain, it would appear, of their 



VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN 153 
very ugliness and stupidity. Besides, is it 
any worse for a woman to be vain of her 
looks than of her brains ? — and the advanced 
woman is without doubt most inordinately 
vain of those. Of the two, so far as they 
are at present developed, is there any doubt 
that the woman with beauty is better off 
than the woman with brains ? In some 
few hundred years, maybe, the brain of 
woman will be a joy to herself and the 
world : when she has got more used to its 
possession, and familiar with the fruitful 
control of it. At present, however, it is 
merely a discomfort, not to say a danger, 
to herself and every one else — a tiresome 
engine for the pedantic assimilation of Ger- 
man and the higher mathematics. And it 
may well happen — horrid prophecy — that 
when that brain of woman has come to its 
perfection, the flower of its meditation will 
be to realise the significance, the sacredness, 
of the Simple Woman. It is in its appre- 
hension of the mystery of simplicity that 
the brain of man, at present, is superior to 
that of woman. 

Young brain delights in the complex, old 



154 PROSE FANCIES 

in the simple. Woman's love of the com- 
plex has been illustrated abundantly during 
the last few years, in her enthusiasm for 
certain great imperfect writers, who have 
been able to stir up the mud in the fountain 
of life (doubtless, to medicinal ends) but 
unable to bring it clear again. An eternal 
enigma herself, woman is eternally in love 
with enigmas. Like a child, she loves any 
one who will show her the ' works ' of exist- 
ence, and she is still in that inquisitive stage 
when one imagines that the inside of a doll 
will afford explanation of its fascinating 
exterior. It is no use telling her that 
analysis can never explain the mystery of 
synthesis. Like an American humourist, she 
still goes on wanting ' t' know.' 

Even more than man, she exaggerates the 
value of the articulate, the organised. She has 
always been in love with ' accomplishments,' 
and she loves natures that are minted into 
current coin of ready gifts and graces. She 
cares more for the names of things than for the 
things themselves. Of things without names 
she is impatient. Talkative as she is said to 
be, and in so many modern languages, she 



VIRAGOES OF THE BRAIN 155 

knows not yet how to talk with Silence — un- 
less she be the inspired Simple Woman — for 
to talk with Silence is to apprehend the 
mystic meanings of simplicity. For this 
reason, mystics are more often found among 
men than women — a fact on which the 
Pioneer Club is at liberty to congratulate 
itself What advanced woman understands 
that saying of Paracelsus : ' who tastes a crust 
of bread tastes the heavens and all the stars.' 
Else would she understand also that the 
* humblest' ministrations of life, those nearest 
to nature, are the profoundest in their sig- 
nificance : that it means as much to bake a 
loaf as to write a book, and that to watch 
over the sleep of a child is a liberal educa- 
tion — nay, an initiation granted only to 
mothers and those meek to whom mysteries 
are revealed. It has always been to the 
simple woman that the angel has appeared — 
to Mary of Bethany, to Joan of Arc. Is it 
impious to infer that the Angel Gabriel him- 
self dreads a blue-stocking ? What chance 
indeed would he have with our modern 
viragoes of the brain, the mighty daughters 
of the pen ? 



THE EYE OF THE 
BEHOLDER 

Other people's poetry — I don't mean their 
published verse, but their absurdly romantic 
view of unromantic objects — is terribly hard 
to translate. It seldom escapes being turned 
into prose. It must have happened to you 
now and again to have had the photograph 
of your friend's beloved produced for your 
inspection and opinion. It is a terrible 
moment. If she does happen to be a really 
pretty girl — heavens ! what a relief. You 
praise her with almost hysterical gratitude. 
But if, as is far more likely, her beauty proves 
to be of that kind which exists only in the 
eyes of a single beholder, what a plight is 
yours ! How you strive to look as if she were 
a new Helen, and how hopelessly unconvinc- 
ing is your weary expression — as unconvinc- 
ing as one's expression when, having weakly 

156 



THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER 157 
pretended acquaintance with a strange author, 
we feign ecstatic recognition of some passage 
or episode quoted by his ruthless admirer. 
There is this hope in the case of the photo- 
graph : that its amorous possessor will 
probably be incapable of imagining any one 
insensitive to such a Golconda of charms, and 
you have always in your power the revenge 
of showing him your own sacred graven 
image. 

Is it not curious that the very follies we 
delight in for ourselves should seem so 
stupid, so absolutely vulgar, when practised 
by others? The last illusion to forsake a 
man is the absolute belief in his own refine- 
ment. 

A test experience in other people's poetry 
is to sit in the pit of a theatre and watch 
'Arry and 'Arriet making love and eating 
oranges simultaneously. 'Arry has a low 
forehead, close, black, oily hair, his eyes and 
nose are small, and his face is freckled. His 
clothes are painfully his best, he wears an 
irrelevant flower, and his tie has escaped from 
the stud and got high into his neck, eclipsing 
his collar. 'Arriet has thick unexpressive 



158 PROSE FANCIES 

features, relying rather on the expressiveness 
of her flaunting hat, she wears a straight 
fringe low down on her forehead, and 
endeavours to disguise her heavy ennui 
by an immovable simper. This pair loll 
one upon each other. Whether lights be 
high or low they hold each other's hands, 
hands hard and coarse with labour, with 
nails bitten down close to the quick. 
But, for all that, they, in their strange 
uncouth fashion, would seem to be loving 
each other. * Not we alone have passions 
hymeneal,' sings an aristocratic poet They 
smile at each other, an obvious animal 
smile, and you perhaps shudder. Or you 
study them for a realistic novel, or you call 
up that touch of nature our great poet 
talks of But somehow you cannot forget 
how their lips will stick and smell of oranges 
when they kiss each other on the way home. 
What is the truth about this pair? Is it in 
the unlovely details on which, maybe, we 
have too much insisted — or behind these are 
we to imagine their souls radiant in celestial 
nuptials ? 

Mr. Chevalier may be said to answer the 



THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER 159 

question in his pictures of coster love-making. 
But are those pictures to be taken as docu- 
ments, or are they not the product of Mr. 
Chevalier's idealistic temperament ? Does 
the coster actually worship his ' dona ' with 
so fine a chivalry? Is he so sentimentally 
devoted to his *old Dutch'? If you answer 
the question in the negative, you are in this 
predicament : all the love and * the fine feel- 
ings ' remain with the infinitesimal residuum 
of the cultured and professionally ' refined.* 
Does that residuum actually incarnate all the 
love, devotion, honour, and other noble 
qualities in man ? One need hardly trouble 
to answer the absurd question. Evidently 
behind the oranges, and the uncouth animal 
manners, we should find souls much like our 
own refined essences, had we the seeing 
sympathetic eye. All depends on the eye of 
the beholder. 

Among the majority of literary and artistic 
people of late that eye of the beholder has 
been a very cynical supercilious eye. Never 
was such a bitter cruel war waged against 
the poor bourgeois. The lack of humanity in 
recent art and literature is infinitely depress- 



i6o PROSE FANCIES 

ing. Doubtless, it is the outcome of a 
so-called ' realism,' which dares to pretend 
that the truth about life is to be found on its 
grimy pock-marked surface. Over against 
the many robust developments of democracy, 
and doubtless inspired by them, is a marked 
spread of the aristocratic spirit — selfish, 
heartless, subtle, of mere physical 'refine- 
ment ' ; a spirit, too, all the more inhuman 
because it is for the most part not tempered 
by any intercourse with homely dependants, 
as in the feudal aristocracy. It would 
seem to be the product of 'the higher 
education,' a university priggishness, poor 
as proud. It is the deadliest spirit 
abroad ; but, of course, though it may 
poison life and especially art for a while, 
the great laughing democracy will in good 
time dispose of it as Hercules might crush 
a wasp. 

This is the spirit that draws up its skirts 
and sneers to itself at poor ' old bodies ' in 
omnibuses, because, forsooth, they are stout, 
and out of the fulness of the heart the mouth 
speaketh. One thinks of Falstaff's plaintive 
* If to be fat is to be hated ! ' At displays of 



THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER i6i 

natural feelings of any sort this comfortless 
evil spirit ever curls the lip. Inhabiting 
modern young ladies, it is especially superior 
to the maternal instinct, and cringes from 
a baby in a railway carriage as from an 
adder. At the dropping of an * h ' 't 
shrinks as though the weighty letter I 1 
fallen upon its great toe, and it will forgive 
anything rather than a provincial accent. It 
lives entirely in the surfaces of things, and, as 
the surface of life is frequently rough and 
prickly, it is frequently uncomfortable. At 
such times it peevishly darts out its little 
sting, like a young snake angry with a farmer's 
boot. It is amusing to watch it venting its 
spleen in papers the bourgeois never read, in 
pictures they don't trouble to understand. 
John Bull's indifference to the * new ' criticism 
is one of the most pleasing features of the 
time. Probably he has not yet heard a 
syllable of it, and, if he should hear, he would 
probably waive it aside with, * I have some- 
thing more to think of than these megrims.' 
And so he has. While these superior folk 
are wrangling about D^gas and Mallarme, 
about ' style ' and ' distinction,' he is doing the 



i62 PROSE FANCIES 

work of the world. There is nothing in life 
y so much exaggerated as the importance of art. 
If it were all wiped off the surface of the 
. earth to-morrow, the world would scarcely 
; miss it. For what is art but a faint reflection 
of the beauty already sown broadcast over 
the face of the world ? And that would re- 
main. We should lose Leonardo and Titian, 
Velasquez and Rembrandt, and a great 
host of modern precious persons, but the 
stars and the great trees, the noble sculptured 
hills, the golden-dotted meadows, the airy 
sailing clouds, and all the regal pageantry of 
the seasons, would still be ours ; and an 
almond-tree in flower would replace the 
National Gallery. 

Yes, surely the true way of contemplating 
these undistinguished masses of humanity, 
this ' h ' dropping, garlic-eating, child-beget- 
ting bourgeois^ is Shakespeare's, Dickens', 
Whitman's way — through the eye of a gentle 
sympathetic beholder — one who understands 
Nature's trick of hiding her most precious 
things beneath rough husks and in rank and 
bearded envelopes — and not through the 
eye-glass of the new critic. 



THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER 163 

For these undistinguished people are, after 
all, alive as their critics are not. They are, 
indeed, the only people who may properly be 
said to be alive, dreaming and building while 
the superior person stands by cogitating 
sarcasms on their swink'd and dusty appear- 
ances. More of the true spirit of romantic 
existence goes to the opening of a little 
grocer's shop in a back street in Whitechapel 
than to all the fine marriages at St. George's, 
Hanover Square, in a year. But, of course 
all depends on the eye of the beholder. 



TRANSFERABLE LIVES 

I SOMETIMES have a fancy to speculate how, 
supposing the matter still undecided, I would 
h"ke to spend my life. Often I feel how good 
it would be to give it in service to one of my 
six dear friends : just to offer it to them as 
so much capital, for whatever it may be worth. 
In pondering the fancy, I need hardly say 
that I do not assess myself at any extrava- 
gant value. I but venture to think that the 
devotion of one human creature, however 
humble, throughout a lifetime, is not a 
despicable offering. To use me as they 
would, to fetch and carry with me, to draw 
on me for whatever force resides in me, as 
they would on a bank account, to the last 
penny, to use my brains for their plans, my 
heart for their love, my blood for added 
length of days : and thus be so much the 
more true in their love, the more prosperous 

164 



TRANSFERABLE LIVES 165 
in their business, the more buoyant in their 
health — by the addition of 7ne, 

But then embarrassment comes upon me. 
Which of my friends do I love the most? 
To whose account of the six would I fain be 
credited? Then again I think of the ten 
thousand virgins, who go mateless about the 
world, sweet women,, with hearts like hidden 
treasure, awaiting the ' Prince's kiss ' that 
never comes ; virgin mothers, whose bosoms 
shall never know the light warm touch of 
baby-hands : 

' Pale primroses 
That die unmarried, ere they can behold 
Bright Phoebus in his strength.' 

How often one sees such a one in train or 
omnibus, her eyes, maybe, spilling the pre- 
cious spikenard of their maternal love on some 
happier woman's child. I noticed one of 
them withering on the stalk, on my way to 
town this morning. She was, I surmised, 
nearly twenty-eight, she carried a roll of 
music, and I had a strong impression that 
she was the sole support of an invalid 
mother. I could hardly resist suggesting to 
one of my men companions, what a good 



i66 PROSE FANCIES 

wife she was longing to make, what a 
Sleeping Beauty she was, waiting for the 
marital kiss that would set all the sweet bells 
of her nature a-chime. I had the greatest 
difficulty in preventing myself from leaning 
over to her, and putting it to her in this way : 

* Excuse me, madam, but I love you. 
Will you be my wife? I am just turning 
thirty. I have so much a year, a comfortable 
little home, and probably another thirty 
years of life to spend. Will you not go 
shares with me ? ' 

And my imagination went on making 
pictures : how her eyes would suddenly 
brighten up like the northern aurora, how 
a strange bloom would settle on her some- 
what weary face, and a dimple steal into her 
chin ; how, when she reached home and sat 
down to read Jane Austen to her mother, 
her mother would suddenly imagine roses in 
the room, and she would blushingly answer, 
' Nay, mother — it is my cheeks ! ' ; and 
presently the mother would ask, 'Where is 
that smell of violets coming from ?' and again 
she would answer, ' Nay, mother — it is my 
thoughts ! ' ; and yet again the mother would 



TRANSFERABLE LIVES 167 

say, * Hush ! listen to that wonderful bird 
singing yonder ! ' and she would answer, 
* Nay, mother dear — it is only my heart ! ' 

But, alas, she alighted at Charing Cross, 
and not one of us in the compartment had 
asked her to be his wife. 

The weary clerk, the sweated shopman, 
the jaded engineer — how good it would be to 
say to any of them, ' Here, let us change 
places awhile. Here is my latch-key, my 
cheque-book, my joy and my leisure. Use 
them as long as you will. Quick, let us 
change clothes, and let me take my share of 
the world's dreariness and pain.' 

Or to stop the old man of sixty, as he 
hobbles down the hill, with never a thought 
of youth or spring in his heart, not a hope in 
his pocket, and his faith long since run dry — 
to stop him and say : ' See, here are thirty 
years ; I have no use for them. Will you 
not take them? If you are quick, you may 
yet catch up Phyllis by the stile. She has 
a wonderful rose in her hand. She will sell 
it you for these thirty years ; and she knows 
a field where a lark is singing as though it 
were in heaven ! ' 



i68 PROSE FANCIES 

To take the old lady from the bath-chair, 
and let her run with her daughter to gather 
buttercups, or make eyes at the church 
gallants. Oh ! this were better far than 
living to oneself, if we were only selfish 
enough to see it ! 

But, best of all were it to go to the 
churchyard, where the dead have long since 
given up all hopes of resurrection, and find 
some new grave, whose inhabitant was not 
yet so fast asleep but that he might be 
awakened by a kind word. To go to Alice's 
grave and call, ' Alice ! Alice ! ' and then 
whisper : ' The spring is here ! Didn't you 
hear the birds calling you ? I have come to 
tell you it is time to get ready. In two 
hours the church-bells will be ringing, and 
Edward will be waiting for you at the altar. 
The organist is already trying over the 
' Wedding March,' and the bridesmaids have 
had their dresses on and off twice. They 
can talk of nothing but orange-blossom and 
rice. Alice, dear, awaken. Ah, did you 
have strange dreams, poor girl — dream that 
you were dead ! Indeed, it v/as a dream — 
an evil dream.' 



TRANSFERABLE LIVES 169 

And, then, as Alice stepped bewildered 
homewards, to steal down into her place, and 
listen, and listen, till the sound of carriages 
rolled towards the gate, listen till the low 
hush of the marriage service broke into the 
wild happy laughter of the organ, and the 
babbling sound of sweet girls stole through 
the church porch ; then to lie back and to 
think that Alice and Edward had been 
married after all — that your little useless life 
had been so much use, at least : just to 
dream of that awhile, and then softly fall 
asleep. 

Ah, who would not give all his remaining 
days to ransom his beloved dead ? — to give 
them the joys they missed, the hopes they 
clutched at, the dreams they dreamed. 
O river that runs so sweetly by their feet, 
when you shall have stopped running will 
they rise? O sun that shines above their 
heads, when you have ceased from shining 
will they come to us again? When the 
lark shall have done with singing, and the 
hawthorn bud no more, shall we then, 
indeed, hear the voices of our beloved, 
sweeter than song of river or bird ? 



THE APPARITION OF YOUTH 

Sententious people are fond of telling us 
that we change entirely every seven years, 
that in that time every single atomy of body 
(and soul ?) finds a substitute. Personally, I 
am of opinion that we change oftener, that 
rather we are triennial in our constitu- 
tion. In fact, it is a change we owe to our 
spiritual cleanliness. But there is a truth 
pertaining to the change of which the sen- 
tentious people are not, I think, aware. 
When they speak of our sloughing our dead 
selves, they imagine the husk left behind as 
a dead length of hollow scale or skin. 
Would it were so. These sententious people, 
with all their information, have probably 
never gone through the process of which 
they speak. They have never changed from 
th-e beginning, but have been consistently 

their dull selves all through. To those, how- 
170 



THE APPARITION OF YOUTH 171 

ever, who can look back on many a meta- 
morphosis, the quick-change artists of life, 
a fearful thing is known. The length of dis- 
carded snake lies glistering in the greenwood, 
motionless, and slowly perishes with the 
fallen leaves in autumn. But for the dead 
self is no autumn. By some mysterious 
law of spiritual propagation, it breaks away 
from us, a living thing, as the offspring of 
primitive organisms are, it is said, broken off 
the tail of their sole and undivided parent. 
It goes on living as we go on living ; often, 
indeed if we be poets or artists, it survives us 
many years ; it may be a friend, but it is 
oftener a foe ; and it is always a sad 
companion. 

I sat one evening in my sumptuous 
library near Rutland Gate. I was deep in 
my favourite author, my bank-book, when 
presently an entry — as a matter of fact, a 
quarterly allowance to a friend (well, a 
woman friend) of my youth — set me think- 
ing. Just then my man entered. A youth 
wished to see me. He would not give his 
name, but sent word that I knew him very 
well for all that. Being in a good humour, I 



172 PROSE FANCIES 

consented to see him. He was a young man 
of about twenty, and his shabby clothes 
could not conceal that he was comely. He 
entered the room with light step and chin 
in air, and to my surprise he strode over 
to where I sat and seated himself without a 
word. Then he looked at me with his blue 
eyes, and I recognised him with a start. 
* What's the new book?' he asked eagerly, 
pointing to my open bank-book. 

Bending over he looked at it : * Pshaw ! 
Figures. You used not to care much about 
them. When we were together it used to be 
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads^ or Shake- 
speare's Sonnets ! ' 

As he spoke, he tugged a faded copy of 
the Sonnets from his pocket. It slipped 
from his hand. As it fell it opened, and 
faded violets rained from its leaves. The 
youth gathered them up carefully, as though 
they had been valuable, and replaced them. 

* How do you sell your violets ? ' I asked, 
ironically. ' I '11 give you a pound apiece for 
them ! ' 

* A pound ! Twenty pounds apiece 
wouldn't buy them,' he laughed, and I 



THE APPARITION OF YOUTH 173 

remembered that they were the violets Alice 
Sunshine and I had gathered one spring day 
when I was twenty. We had found them in 
a corner of the dingle, where I had been 
reading the Sonnets to her, till in our book 
that day we read no more. As we parted 
she pressed them between the leaves and 
kissed them. I remember, too, that I had 
been particular to write the day and hour 
against them, and I remember further how 
it puzzled me a couple of years after what 
the date could possibly mean. 

Having secured his book, my visitor once 
more looked me straight in the face, and as 
he did so he seemed to grow perplexed 
and disappointed. As I gazed at him my 
contentment, too, seemed to be slowly 
melting away. Five minutes before I had 
felt the most comfortable bourgeois in the 
world. There seemed nothing I was in need 
of, but there was something about this youth 
that was dangerously disillusionising. Here 
was I already envying him his paltry violets. 
I was even weak enough to offer him five 
pounds apiece for them, but he still smilingly 
shook his head. 



174 PROSE FANCIES 

* Well ! ' he said presently, * what have you 
been doing with yourself all these years ? ' 

I told him of my marriage and my partner- 
ship in a big city house. 

' Phew ! ' he said. ' Monstrous dull, isn't 
it? As for me, I never intend to marry. 
And if you don't marry, what do you want 
with money ? You used to despise it enough 
once. And do you remember our favourite 
line : "Our loves mto corpses or wives ? " * 

* Hush ! ' I said, for wives have ears. 

* Is it Alice Sunshine ? ' he asked. 
' No,' I said, ' not Alice Sunshine/ 

* Maud Willow ? ' 

* No, not Maud Willow.' 

* Jenny Hopkins?' 

* No, not Jenny Hopkins.' 

* Lucy Rainbow ? ' 

* No, not Lucy Rainbow.' 

* Now who else was there ? I cannot 
remember them all. Ah, I remember now. 
It wasn't Lilian, after all ? ' 

* No, poor Lilian died ten years ago. I 
am afraid you don't know my wife. I don't 
think you ever met' 

* It isn't Edith Appleblossom, surely ? Is it* 



THE APPARITION OF YOUTH 175 

*No, I . . .' and then I stopped just in 
time ! * No, you don't know my wife, I 'm 
sure, and if you don't mind my saying so, I 
think I had better not introduce you. For- 
give me, but she wouldn't quite understand 
you, I fear . . .' 

* Wouldn't quite approve, eh?' said he, 
with a merry laugh. * Poor old chap ! ' 

' Well, I 'm better off than that,' he con- 
tinued. * Why, Doll and I love for a week, 
and then forget each other's names in a 
twelvemonth, when Poll comes along, and so 
on. And neither of us is any the worse, 
believe me. We're one as fickle as the 
other, so where 's the harm ? ' 

*Ah, my dear fellow, you did make a 
mistake,' he ran on. ' I suppose you forget 
Robert Louis' advice — ^^ Times are changed 
with hitn who marries" etc' 

* He 's married himself,' I replied. 

'And I suppose you never drop in for a pipe 
at " The Three Tuns " now of an evening ? ' 

' No ! I haven't been near the place these 
many years.' 

* Poor old fellow ! The Bass is superb at 
present. 



176 PROSE FANCIES 

I recollected. ' Won't you have some wine 
with me?' I said. 'I have some fine old 
Chianti. And take a cigar ? * 

* No, thanks, old man. I 'm too sad. 
Come with me to "The Three Tuns," and 
let *s have an honest pint and an honest pipe 
together. I don't care about cigars. Come 
to-night. Let's make a night of it. We'll 
begin at "The Three Tuns," then call at 
" The Blue Posts," look in at " The Dog and 
Fire-irons," and finish up at "The Shake- 
speare's Head." What was it we used to 
troll?— 

' From tavern to tavern 

Youth passes along, 

With an armful of girl 

And a heart-full of song."* 

* Hush ! ' I cried in terror ; ' it is impossible. 
I cannot. Come to my club instead.' But 
he shook his head. 

I persuaded him to have some Chianti at 
last, but he drank it without spirit, and thus 
we sat far into the night talking of old days. 

Before he went I made him a definite offer 
— ^he must have bewitched me, I am sure — 
I offered him no less than ^^5,000 and a share 



THE APPARITION OF YOUTH 177 

in the business for the sprig of almond- 
blossom the ridiculous young pagan carried 
in his hat. 

And will you believe me? He declined 
the offer. 



THE PATHETIC FLOURISH 

The dash under the signature, the unneces- 
sary rat-tat of the visitor, the extravagant 
angle of the hat in bowing, the extreme 
unction in the voice, the business man's 
importance, the strut of the cock, the swagger 
of the bad actor, the long hair of the poet, 
the Salvation bonnet, the blue shirt of the 
Socialist : against all these, and a hundred 
examples of the swagger of unreflecting life, 
did a little brass knocker in Gray's Inn warn 
me the other evening. I had knocked as 
no one should who is not a postman, with 
somewhat of a flourish. I had plainly said, 
in its metallic reverberations, that I was some- 
body. As I left my friends, I felt the knocker 
looking at me, and when I came out into the 
great square, framing the heavens like an 
astronomical chart, the big stars repeated the 
lesson with thousand-fold iteration. How 

178 



THE PATHETIC FLOURISH 179 
they seemed to nudge each other and twinkle 
among themselves at the poor ass down there, 
who actually took himself and his doings so 
seriously as to flourish, even on a little brass 
knocker. 

Yes, I had once again forgotten Jupiter. 
How many hundred times was he bigger 
than the earth ? Never mind, there he was, 
bright as crystal, for me to measure my 
importance against ! The street-lamps did 
their best, I observed, to brave it out, and 
the electric lights in Holborn seemed cer- 
tainly to have the best of it — as cheap jewel- 
lery is gaudiest in its glitter. One could much 
more easily believe that all these hansoms 
with their jewelled eyes, these pretty, saucily 
frocked women with theirs, this busy glitter- 
ing milky way of human life was the endur- 
ing, and those dimmed uncertain points up 
yonder but the reflections of human gas-lights. 
A city clerk, with shining evening hat, 
went by, his sweetheart on his arm. They 
were wending gaily to the theatre, without a 
thought of all the happy people who had 
done the same long ago — hasting down the 
self-same street, to the self-same theatre, with 



i8o PROSE FANCIES 

the very same sweet talk — all long since 
mouldering in their graves. I felt I ought to 
rush up and shake them, take them into a by- 
street, turn their eyes upon Jupiter, and tell 
them they must die ; but I thought it might 
spoil the play for them. 

Besides, there were so many hundreds in 
the streets I should have to address in the 
same way : formidable people, too, clad in re- 
spectability as in a coat of mail. The pomp- 
ous policeman yonder : I longed to go and 
say to him that there had been policemen 
before ; that he was only the ephemeral 
example of a world-old type, and needn't 
take himself so seriously. It was an irresis- 
tible temptation to ask him : ' Canst thou 
bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or 
loose the bands of Orion ? Canst thou bring 
forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst 
thou guide Arcturus with his sons ? ' But I 
forbore, and just then, glancing into an oyster 
shop, I was fascinated by the oysterman. He 
was rapidly opening a dozen for a new 
customer, and wore the while the solemnest 
face I ever saw. Oysters were so evidently, 
so pathetically, all the world to him. All his 



THE PATHETIC FLOURISH i8i 

surroundings suggested oysters, legends of 
their prices and qualities made the art on his 
walls, printed price-lists on his counter made 
his literature, the prospects and rivalries of 
trade made his politics : oysters were, in 
fact, his raison d^ctre. His associations from 
boyhood had been oysters, I felt certain that 
his relatives, even his ancestors, must be 
oysters, too ; and that if he had any idea of 
a supreme being, it must take the form of an 
oyster. Indeed, a sort of nightmare seemed 
suddenly to take possession of the world, 
in which alternately policemen swallowed 
oysters and oysters policemen. How sad it 
all was — that masterly flourish of the knife 
with which the oysterman ruthlessly hurried 
dozen after dozen into eternity ; that defer- 
ential * Sir ' in his voice to every demand of 
his customer ; that brisk alacrity with which 
he bid his assistant bring 'the gentleman's 
half-stout' 

There seemed a world of tears in these 
simple operations, and the plain oysterman 
had grown suddenly mystical as an astro- 
logical symbol. And, indeed, there was 
planetary influence in the thing, for there 



i82 PROSE FANCIES 

was Jupiter high above us, sneering at our 
little world of policemen and oystermen. 

His grin disagreeably reminded me — had 
I not myself that very night ignorantly flour- 
ished on a brass knocker ? 

It is so hard to remember the respect we 
owe to death. Yet for me there is always a 
feeling that if we direct our lives cautiously, 
with proportionate seriousness and no more, 
not presuming on life as our natural birthright, 
but taking it with simple thankfulness as a 
boon which we have done nothing to deserve, 
and which may be snatched from us before 
our next breath : that, if we so order our days, 
Death may respect our humility. 

* The lusty lord, rejoicing in his pride, 

He draweth down ; before the armed knight 
With jingling bridle-rein he still doth ride ; 
He crosseth the strong captain in the fight ' ; 

but such are proud people, arrogant in beauty 
and strength. With a humble person, who 
is careful not to flourish beneath his signature, 
who knocks just as much as he means on the 
knocker, bows just as much as he respects, 
smiles cautiously, and never fails to touch his 



THE PATHETIC FLOURISH 183 

hat to the King of Terrors — may he not deal 
more gently with such a one ? 

And yet Death is not a pleasant companion 
at Life's feast, however kindly disposed. One 
cannot quite trust him, and he doesn't go 
well with flowers. Perhaps, after all, they 
are wisest who forget him, and happy indeed 
are they who have not yet caught sight of him 
grinning to himself among the green branches 
of their Paradise. 

Yes, it is good that youth should go with a 
feather in his cap, that spring should garland 
herself with blossom, and love's vows make 
light of death. He is a bad companion for 
young people. But for older folk the wisdom 
of that knocker in Gray's Inn applies. 



A TAVERN NIGHT 

Looking back, in weak moments, we are 
sometimes heard to say: 'After all, youth was 
a great fool. Look at the tinsel he was sure 
was solid gold. Can you imagine it ? This 
tawdry tinkling bit of womanhood, a silly 
doll that says " Don't " when you squeeze it, 
— he actually mistook her for a goddess.' 
Ah ! reader, don't you wish you could make 
such a splendid mistake ? I do. I 'd give 
anything to be once more sitting before the 
footlights for the first time, with the wonder- 
ful overture just beginning to steal through 
my senses. 

Ah ! violins, whither would you take my 
soul? You call to it like the voice of one 
waiting by the sea, bathed in sunset. Why 
do you call me ? What are these wonderful 
things you are whispering to my soul ? You 
promise — ah ! what things you promise, 
strange voices of the string ! 

184 



A TAVERN NIGHT 185 
O sirens, have pity! It is the soul of a 
boy comes out to meet you. His heart is 
pure, his body sweet as apples. Oh, be 
faithful, betray him not, beautiful voices of 
the wondrous world ! 

David and I sat together in a theatre. The 
overture had succeeded. Our souls had 
followed it over the footlights, and, floating 
in the limelight, shone there awaiting the 
fulfilment of the promise. The play was 
* Pygmalion and Galatea.' I almost forget 
now how the scenes go, I only know that at 
the appearance of Galatea we knew that the 
overture had not lied. There, in dazzling 
white flesh, was all it had promised ; and 
when she called ' Pyg-ma-lion ! ' how our 
hearts thumped ! for we knew it was really 
us she was calling. 

* Pyg-ma-lion ! ' ' Pyg-ma-lion ! ' 
It was as though Cleopatra called us from 
the tomb. 

Our hands met. We could hear each 
other's blood singing. And was not the 
play itself an allegory of our coming lives ? 
Did not Galatea symbolise all the sleeping 
beauty of the world that was to awaken 



i86 PROSE FANCIES 

warm and fragrant at the kiss of our youth ? 
And somewhere, too, shrouded in enchanted 
quiet, such a white white woman waited for 
our kiss. 

In a vision we saw life like the treasure 
cave of the Arabian thief, and we said to 
our beating hearts that we had the secret of 
the magic word : that the ' Open Sesame ' 
was youth. 

No fall of the curtain could hide the vision 
from our young eyes. It transfigured the 
faces of our fellow-pittites, it made another 
stage of the embers of the sunset, a distant 
bridge of silver far down the street. Then we 
took it with us to the tavern : and, as I think 
of the solemn libations of that night, I know 
not whether to laugh or cry. Doubtless, you 
will do the laughing and I the crying. 

We had got our own corner. Turning 
down the gas, the fire played at day and 
night with our faces. Imagine us in one of 
the flashes, solemnly raising our glasses, 
hands clasped across the table, earnest 
gleaming eyes holding each other above it. 
' Old man ! some day, somewhere, a woman 
like that!* 



A TAVERN NIGHT 187 

There was still a sequel. At home at last 
and in bed, how could I sleep? It seemed 
as if I had got into a rosy sunset cloud in 
mistake for my bed. The candle was out, 
and yet the room was full of rolling light. 

I '11 swear I could have seen to read by it, 
whatever it was. 

It was no use. I must get up. I struck a 
light, and in a moment was deep in the 
composition of a fiery sonnet. It was 
evidently that which had caused all the 
phosphorescence. But a sonnet is a mere 
pill-box. It holds nothing. A mere cockle- 
shell. And, oh ! the raging sea it could not 
hold ! Besides, being confessedly an art- 
form, duly licensed to lie, it is apt to be 
misunderstood. It could not say in plain 
English, * Meet me at the pier to-morrow at 
three in the afternoon ' ; it could make no 
assignation nearer than the Isles of the Blest, 
' after life's fitful fever.' Therefore, it seemed 
well to add a postscript to that effect in 
prose. 

And then, how was she to receive it? 
Needless to say, there was nothing to be 
hoped from the post ; and I should have said 



i88 PROSE FANCIES 

before that Tyre and Sidon face each other 
on opposite sides of the river, and that 
my home was in Sidon, three miles from 
the ferry. 

Likewise, it was now nearing three in the 
morning. Just time to catch the half-past 
three boat, run up to the theatre, a mile 
away, and meet the return boat. So down 
down through the creaking house, gingerly, 
as though I were a Jason picking my way 
among the coils of the sleeping dragon. 
Soon I was shooting along the phantom 
streets, like Mercury on a message through 
Hades. 

At last the river came in sight, growing 
slate-colour in the earliest dawn. I could 
see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, 
and snoring in its sleep. I said to myself 
that this was Styx and the fare an obolus. 
As I jumped on board, with hot face and 
hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to 
the engines, the boat slowly snuffled itself 
half awake, and we shoved out into the 
sleepy water. 

As we crossed, the light grew, and the gas- 
lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam. 



A TAVERN NIGHT 189 

Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, 
as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of 
his bedclothes ; but as yet he slept, and only 
the silver bosom of his spouse the moon was 
uncovered. 

When we landed, the streets of Tyre were 
already light, but empty: as though they 
had got up early to meet some one who had 
not arrived. I sped through them like a sea- 
gull that has the harbour to itself, and was 
not long in reaching the theatre. How 
desolate the playbills looked that had been 
so companionable but two or three hours be- 
fore. And there was her photograph ! 
Surely it was an omen. Ah, my angel ! 
See, I am bringing you my heart in a song 
' All my heart in this my singing ! ' 

I dropped the letter into the box : but, as 
I turned away, momentarily glancing up the 
long street, I caught sight of an approaching 
figure that could hardly be mistaken. . Good 
Heavens! it was David, and he too was 
carrying a letter. 



SANDRA BELLONI'S 
PINEWOOD 

(to the sweet memory of FRANCES WYNNE) 

I FELT jaded and dusty, I needed flowers 
and sunshine ; and remembering that some 
one had told me — erroneously, I have since 
discovered ! — that the pinewood wherein 
Sandra Belloni used to sing to her harp, 
like a nixie, in the moonlit nights, lay near 
Oxshott in Surrey, I vowed myself there 
and then to the Meredithian pilgrimage. 

The very resolution uplifted me with lyric 
gladness, and I went swinging out of the old 
Inn where I live with the heart of a boy. 
Across Lincoln's Inn Fields, down by the 
Law Courts, and so to Waterloo. I felt I 
must have a confidante, so I told the slate- 
coloured pigeons in the square where I was 
off — out among the thrushes, the broom, 
and the may. But they wouldn't come. 

190 



SANDRA BELLONI'S PINEWOOD 191 

They evidently deemed that a legal purlieu 
was a better place for ' pickings.' 

Half-a-crown return to Oxshott and a 
train at 12.35. You know the ride better 
than I, probably, and what Surrey is at the 
beginning of June. The first gush of green 
on our getting clear of Clapham was like 
the big drink after an afternoon's hay- 
making. There was but one cloud on the 
little journey. She got into the next 
carriage. 

I dreamed all the way. On arriving at 
Oxshott I immediately became systematic. 
Having a very practical belief in the material 
basis of all exquisite experience, I simply 
nodded to the great pinewoods half a mile 
off, on the brow of long heathy downs to 
the left of the railway bridge — as who should 
say, ' I shall enjoy you all the better 
presently for some sandwiches and a pint of 
ale ' — and promptly, not to say scientifically, 
turned down the Oxshott road in search of 
an inn. 

Oxshott is a quaint little hamlet, one of 
the hundred villages where we are going to 
live when we have written great novels ; but 



192 PROSE FANCIES 

I didn't care for the village inn, so walked a 
quarter of a mile nearer Leatherhead, till 
the Old Bear came in sight. 

There I sat in the drowsy parlour, the 
humming afternoon coming in at the door, 
*the blue fly' singing on the hot pane, 
dreaming all kinds of gauzy-winged dreams, 
while my body absorbed ham sandwiches 
and some excellent ale. Of course I did 
not leave the place without the inevitable 
reflection on Lamb and the inns he had 
immortalised. Outside again my thoughts 
were oddly turned to the nature of my 
expedition by two figures in the road — an 
unhappy-looking couple, evidently * belonging 
to each other,' the young woman with babe 
at breast, trudging together side by side — 

* One was a girl with a babe that throve, 

Her ruin and her bliss ; 
One was a youth with a lawless love, 
Who claspt it the more for this. ' 

The quotation was surely inevitable for 
any one who knows Mr. Meredith's tragic 
little picture of * The Meeting.' 

Thus I was brought to think of Sandra 
again, and of the night when the Brookfield 



SANDRA BELLONrS PINEWOOD 193 

ladies had heard her singing like a spirit in 
the heart of the moon-dappled pinewood, 
and impresario Pericles had first prophesied 
the future prima donna. 

Do you remember his inimitable out- 
burst ? — * I am made my mind ! I send 
her abroad to ze Academie for one, two, 
tree year. She shall be instructed as was 
not before. Zen a noise at La Scala. 
No— Paris ! No — London ! She shall 
astonish London fairst. Yez ! if I take a 
theatre ! Yez ! if I buy a newspaper ! 
Yez ! if I pay feefty-sossand pound ! ' 

Of course, as one does, I had gone 
expecting to distinguish the actual sandy 
mound among the firs where she sat with 
her harp, the young countryman waiting 
close by for escort, and the final 'Giles 
Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten air* 
with which she rewarded him for his patience 
in suffering so much classical music. Mr. 
Meredith certainly gives a description of the 
spot close enough for identification, with time 
and perseverance. But, reader, I had gone out 
this afternoon in the interest rather of fresh 
air than of sentimental topography; and it was 
N 



194 PROSE FANCIES 

quite enough for me to feel that somewhere 
in that great belt of pinewood it had all been 
true, and that it was through those fir- 
branches and none other in the world that 
that ' sleepy fire of early moonlight ' had so 
wonderfully hung. 

After crossing the railway bridge the road 
rises sharply for a few yards, and then a 
whole stretch of undulating woodland is 
before one : to the right bosky green, but on 
the left a rough dark heath with a shaggy 
wilderness of pine for background, heightened 
here and there with a sudden surprise of 
gentle silver birch. How freshly the wind 
met one at the top of the road : a south- 
west wind soft and blithe enough to have 
blown through * Diana of the Crossways/ 

'You saucy south wind, setting all the budded beech 

boughs swinging 
Above the wood anemones that flutter, flushed and white, 
When far across the wide salt waves your quick way you 

were winging, 
Oh ! tell me, tell me, did you pass my sweetheart's ship last 



night ? 



Ah ! let the daisies be, 
South wind ! and answer me ; 
Did you my sailor see ? 
Wind, whisper very low, 
For none but you must know 
I love my lover so.' 



SANDRA BELLONPS PINEWOOD 195 

I had been keeping that question to ask it 
for two or three days, since a good friend 
had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances 
Wynne ; and the little volume, charmingly 
entitled Whisper^ was close under my arm 
as I turned from the road across the heath — 
a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, 
wind-sown from the pines behind. And 
then presently, like a much greater person, 
* I found me in a gloomy wood astray.' 

But I soon realised that it wasn't the day 
for pinewoods, however rich in associations. 
Dark days are their opportunity. Then one 
is in sympathy. But on days when the 
sunshine is poured forth like yellow wine, 
when the broom is ablaze, and the sky blue 
as particular eyes, the contrast of those dark 
aisles without one green blade is uncanny. 
Its listening loneliness almost frightens one. 
Brurrhh ! One must find a greenwood where 
things are companionable : birds within call, 
butterflies in waiting, and a bee now and 
again to bump one, and be off again with 
a grumbled 'Beg your pardon. Confound 
you ! ' So presently imagine me * prone at 
the foot of yonder ' sappy chestnut, nice little 



196 PROSE FANCIES 

cushions of moss around me, one for Whisper^ 
one for a pillow ; above, a world of luminous 
green leaves, filtered sunlight lying about in 
sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and at a 
distance in the open shine a patch of 
hyacinths, * like a little heaven below.' 

Whisper ! 'Tis, the sweetest little book of 
lyrics since Mrs. DoUie Radford's Light 
Load. Whitman, you will remember, always 
used to take his songs out into the presence 
of the fields and skies to try them. A severe 
test, but a little book may bear it as well 
as a great one. The Leaves of Grass claims 
measurement with oaks ; but Whisper I 
tried by speedwell and cinquefoil, and 
many other tiny sweet things for which I 
know no name, by all airs and sounds 
coming to me through the wood, quaint 
little notes of hidden birds, — and the songs 
were just as much at home there as the 
rest, because they also had grown out of 
Nature's heart, and were as much hers as 
any leaf or bird. So I dotted speedwell all 
amongst them, because I felt they ought to 
know each other. 

I wonder if you love to fill your books 



SANDRA BELLONFS PINEWOOD 197 

with flowers. It is a real bookish delight, 
and they make such a pretty diary. My 
poets are full of them, and they all mean a 
memory— old spring mornings, lost sunsets, 
walks forgotten and unforgotten. Here a 
buttercup pressed like finely beaten brass, 
there a great yellow rose— in my Keats ; my 
Chaucer is like his old meadows, ' ypoudred 
with daisie,' and my Herrick is full of violets. 
The only thing is that they haunt me 
sometimes. But then, again, they bloom 
afresh every spring. As Mr. Monkhouse 
sings : — 

* Sweet as the rose that died last year is the rose that is 
born to-day.' 

But I grow melancholy with an Englishman's 
afterthought, for I coined no such reflections 
dreaming there in the wood. It is only on 
paper that one moralises— just where one 

shouldn't. 

My one or two regrets were quite practical 
—that I had not learnt botany at school, and 
that the return train went so early. 



WHITE SOUL 

What is so white in the world, my love, 

As thy maiden soul — 

The dove that flies 

Softly all day within thine eyes, 

And nests within thine heart at night ? 

Nothing so white. 

One has heard poets speak of a quill 
dropped from an angel's wing. That is the 
kind of nib of which I feel in need to-night. 
If I could but have it just for to-night only, 
— I would willingly bequeath it to the British 
Museum to-morrow. As a rule I am very 
well satisfied with the particular brand of gilt 
' J ' with which I write to the dictation of the 
Muse of Daily Bread ; but to-night it is 
different. Though it come not, I must make 
ready to receive a loftier inspiration. Whitest 
paper, newest pen, ear sensitive, tremulous ; 
heart pure and mind open, broad and clear as 
the blue air for the most delicate gossamer 
thoughts to wing through ; and snow-white 
words, lily-white words, words of ivory and 

198 



WHITE SOUL 199 

pearl, words of silver and alabaster, words 
white as hawthorn and daisy, words white as 
morning milk, words * whiter than Venus' 
doves, and softer than the down beneath their 
wings ' — virginal, saintlike, nunnery words. 

It may be because I love White Soul that I 
think her the fairest blossom on the Tree of 
Life, yet a child said of her to its mother, the 
other day : ' Look at White Soul's face — it 
is as though it were lit up from inside ! ' 
Children, if they don't always tell the truth, 
seldom tell lies ; and I always think that the 
praise of children is better worth having than 
the Cross of the Legion of Honour. They are 
the only critics from whom praise is not to 
be bought. As animals are said to see spirits, 
children have, I think, an eye for souls. It is 
so easy to have an eye for beautiful surfaces. 
Such eyes are common enough. An eye for 
beautiful souls is rarer ; and, unless you 
possess that eye for souls, you waste your 
time on White Soul. She has, of course, her 
external attractions, dainty features, refined 
contours ; but these it would not be difficult 
to match in any morning's walk. It is when 
she smiles that her face, it seems to me, is 



200 PROSE FANCIES 

one of the most wonderful in the world. Till 
she smiles, it is like the score of some great 
composer's song before the musician releases 
it warbling for joy along the trembling keys ; 
it is like the statue of Memnon before the 
dawn steals to kiss it across the desert. 
White Soul's face when she smiles is made, 
you would say, of larks and dew, of nightin- 
gales and stars. 

She is an eldritch little creature, a little 
frightening to live with — with her gold flaxen 
hair that seems to grow blonder as it nears 
her head : burnt blonde, it would seem, with 
the white light of the spirit that pours all 
day long from her brows. There is something, 
as we say, almost supernatural about her — 
* a fairy's child.' The gipsies have a share in 
her blood, she boasts in her nafve way, and 
with her love for all that is free and lawless 
and under-the-sky — but I always say the 
fairies have more. She is constantly saying 
' Hush ! ' and ' Whisht ! ' when no one else 
can hear a sound, and she dreams the quaint- 
est of dreams. 

Once she woke sobbing in the night and 
told her husband, who knew her ways and 



WHITE SOUL 201 

loved her tenfold for them, that she had 
dreamed herself in the old churchyard, and 
that as the moon rose behind the tower, the 
three old men who live in the three yew-trees 
had come out and played cards upon a tomb 
in the moonlight, and one of them had 
beckoned to her and offered to tell her fortune. 
It fell out that she was to die in the spring, 
and as he held up the fatal card, the old man 
had leered at her — and then a cock crew, 
all three vanished, and she awoke. 

Her dreams are nearly all about dying, and, 
though she is obviously robust, there is that 
transparent ethereal look in her face, which 
makes old women say 'she is not long for 
this world,' that fateful beauty which creates 
an atmosphere of doom about it. You cannot 
look at her without a queer involuntary feel- 
ing that she was born to die in some tragic 
way. She reminds one of those perilously 
fragile vases we feel must get broken, those 
rarely delicate flowers we feel cannot have 
strong healthy roots. 

She is one of those who seem born to see 
terrible things, monstrous accidents, super- 
natural appearances. She has seen death 



202 PROSE FANCIES 

and birth in strange uncanny forms ; and 
she has met with unearthly creatures in the 
lonely corners of rooms. She is a * seventh- 
month child/ and * seventh-month children ' 
always see things/ she says, with a funny 
little sententious shake of her head. 

Yet, with all this, she is the sunniest, healthi- 
est, most domestic little soul that breathes ; 
and no doubt the materialist would be right in 
saying that all this ' spirituelle ' nonsense is 
but a trick of her transparent blonde com- 
plexion, a chance quality in the colour of 
her great luminous eyes. 

Like all women, she was most wonderful 
just before the birth of her first child, a 
little changeling creature wild-eyed as her 
fairy mother. How she made believe with 
the little fairy vestments, the elfin-shirts, 
the pixy-frocks — long before it was time for 
the tiny body to step inside them ; how she 
talked to the unborn soul that none but she 
as yet could see. And all the time she ' knew ' 
she was going to die, that she would never 
see the little immortal that was about to put 
on our mortality : * people ' had told her so 
in her dreams at night, — doubtless * the good 



WHITE SOUL 203 

people/ the fairies. Those who loved her 
grew almost to believe her — she looks so like 
a little Sibyl when she says such things — yet 
her little one came almost without a cry, and 
in a few days the fairy mother was once more 
glinting about the house like a sunbeam. 

Well ! well ! I cannot make you see her 
as I know her : that I fear is certain. You 
might meet her, yet never know her from my 
description. If you wait for the coarse arti- 
culation of words you might well * miss ' her ; 
for her qualities are not histrionic, they have 
no notion of making the best of themselves. 
They remain, so to speak, in nuggets ; they 
are minted into no current coin of fleeting 
fashion and shallow accomplishment. But if 
a face can mean more to you than the whole 
of Johnson's Dictionary, and the Encyclopcedia 
Britannica to boot, if a strain of music can 
convey to you the thrill of human life, with its 
heights and depths and romantic issues and 
possibilities, as Gibbon and Grote can never 
do — come and worship White Soul's face with 
me. Some women's faces are like diamonds 
— they look their best in artificial lights ; 
White Soul's face is bright vv-ith the soft 



204 PROSE FANCIES 

brightness of a flower — a flower tumbled with 
dew, and best seen in the innocent lights of 
dawn. Dear face without words ! 

And if there are those who can look on that 
face without being touched by its strange 
spiritual loveliness, without seeing in it one of 
those clear springs that bubble up from the 
eternal beauty, there must indeed be many 
who would miss the soul for which her face is 
but the ivory gate, who would never know 
how white is all within, never see or hear 
that holy dove. 

But I have seen and heard, and I know that 
if God should covet White Soul and steal her 
from me, her memory would ever remain with 
me as one of those eternal realities of the spirit 
to which ' realities ' of flesh and blood, of wood 
and stone, are but presumptuous shadows. 

I am not worthy of White Soul. Indeed, 
just to grow more worthy of her was I put 
into the world. 



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